Articles : The Best Free Advertising on the Internet

Case Study: Is Lycos InSite Pro Paid Inclusion Worth It?

Last Update: Sunday, March 06, 2005.

In this article I will show you the results of my test with the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion site submission program.

I recently tested the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion system. InSite Pro offers guaranteed inclusion in the Lycos web index within 48 hours of submission, and full refresh of my web pages every 48 hours.

Lycos InSite Pro offers two packages:

* 1-250 Pages: $189.00/month

* 251-500 Pages: $279.00/month

I opted for the $279/month plan. I have about 500 pages of content across my network of sites and wanted all of them indexed in Lycos.

The Results

Lycos currently do not provide keyword, impression or click-through stats, although they do intend to offer them in the near future.

So I checked my traffic stats according to my WebTrendsLive reports. I was shocked to find that Lycos only sent 41 visitors in the first 2 weeks of indexing my site. During the same period, Google sent me thousands of visitors.

So I wrote to Lycos and asked if they could provide access to click through stats for my account. I wanted to double check, just in case my stats were wrong. They couldn't.

So I also asked what I could change in my pages to get more traffic.

Here's their helpful reply:

Every entry in the Lycos index is created by automated software called a "spider." When a Web page is submitted to Lycos, the spider examines the full text of the page and determines relevant keywords based on its composition.

The spider will pay close attention to the components of the URL, the TITLE tag, headings and subheadings, frequency of word use, location of words on the Web page, and the distance between words.

If your Web page contains frames, our spider will be able to index the text in the <NOFRAMES> section only. We cannot examine the pages within your frame.

Once our software has extracted this information, an abstract is created and stored in the Lycos index. Our search software ranks the search results by considering a combination of the factors listed above. Web pages with fewer than 100 words of text are less likely to be found in a Lycos search.

Read that again in case you missed anything.

Note that the Lycos spider pays close attention to the URL. So if you ever wondered if search engines took into account keywords in URLs, you now know the truth.

Another important point is that your pages should contain 100 words or more, otherwise it's unlikely to be found in Lycos.

For some unknown reason Lycos doesn't like my web pages.

There's nothing new in their reply that suggests I have not optimized my web pages in the correct manner to achieve top rankings in Lycos.

Thankfully, Google does like my pages, so I don't intend to change my pages just to cater to the Lycos ranking algorithm.

In case you're wondering, I have canceled my Lycos InSite Pro subscription. But that shouldn't come as a surprise. ;o)

Website promotion is one of the most debated topics on discussion boards today. Many support banner advertising methods, some argue that reciprocal links are the way to go, and others swear by ezine advertising.

One of the most overlooked ways to gain traffic is by writing an article and submitting it to various publications. There is no better way to spark new interest in your product or service than to write an article about it and have that article seen by thousands of interested people. Getting an article published is fairly easy if the article is a topic of interest. Specialty articles should only be submitted to highly targeted publications if you want to increase your chances of being published.

We recently had two of our articles published in the Internet Day publication on September 3rd and 17th. Now, the article on September 3rd was planned. I had submitted the "Preparing your holiday marketing strategy" article that ran in our September 1st issue in the hopes of it being published. We had a fairly good response from the article and we saw an increase of about 400 visitors to our log on the 3rd. We welcomed a bunch of new subscribers and took on a few new clients for design and promotion services.

The article on the 17th was a total surprise. I logged on to check the email in the morning and couldn't believe where all these requests and subscriptions were coming from. I had over 164 legitimate email messages in my basket. Had I signed up for a promotion and forgotten to schedule it on the calendar? No. Did I finally get a decent placement in Yahoo? No. Id an email from Internet Day and my article stared back at me -- an article I wrote a couple of months back about one of our newest website design clients and his horrible experience with a webmaster school in Florida.

Now, why don't more people use article submission to gain traffic? I think one of the main reasons is because webmasters are not always the best writers. I know that I never liked writing very much in school and my grammar is definitely something that needs improvement. But that is the beauty of the net. We are supposed to write to a third-grade level. We also have our own slang on the net and it is generally acceptable to write exactly how we talk. It's much more personal and fun to be able to write that way instead of writing a formal book report for your 10th grade English teacher.

But just because we write so that a third grader can understand our articles doesn't mean we should write like WE ARE a third grader. Which is something I still need to work on. My grammar is terrible. It has never been my strong suit but nevertheless I will continue to write. Why? Because I received countless letters from people telling me what a help I was to them or how much they enjoyed my style of writing. So I took the 4 or 5 "you have bad grammar" responses I got with a grain of salt. I am taking measures to improve my grammar on my own and I have also accepted an offer from one of the kind souls who pointed out some grammatical errors to proofread my articles before they are published.

But the point of this article is to impress upon you the importance of sharing your knowledge and experience with others no matter how bad your grammar may be. I received over 1,000 hits from the Internet Day article on the 17th. That's 1,000 qualified visitors.

Could you imagine what that would have cost us to buy from a banner service? 1,000 click-thrus from highly targeted visitors? At the very low rate of even one dollar a click-thru, that article should have cost us 1,000 advertising dollars. Actual cost of the article = $0.00.

Another interesting angle on it is that Internet Day is distributed to more than 30,000 people. In banner terms that's a 30:1 click-thru ratio! When is the last time you had a banner do that good?

Another perk to having your articles published is that you are bringing visitors to your site based on your skills and knowledge, not the graphic skills of your banner designer. So I encourage you to start compiling a list of publications that you can submit your articles to. Write some articles about topics you have experience with, and start submitting. It is the absolute cheapest way to get qualified traffic to your site.

If your articles have to do with Internet marketing please feel free to submit them here first! We wish you success!

*This article written by Lisa Schmeckpeper of LRS Marketing and originally published in their free newsletter, Website Success Monthly. To receive a free copy of this informative e-zine just send email to subscribe or visit their website at www.lrsmarketing.com. Copyright © 1998 [LRS Marketing]. All rights reserved.