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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)

SEO - How Fast Do You Want To Get To The Top?

By Bill Peters

Article Word Count: 1057 [View Summary] Comments (0)

Search engine optimization by some is considered a science and by others is a game. Recently working on many sites and promoting them for over six months now has made me realize some of the basic techniques. There are many books available about the subject, and almost unlimited resources on the Internet. But the fact of the matter is, the true SEO guru's do not give up their secrets because they are very valuable and once a secret is passed out it's no longer an asset.

Based upon the keyword, or keyword phrase that you are looking to capitalize on the engines determines the base strategy of how you're going to get the ranking you need to follow through with your marketing plan. As long as you're not looking to tackle a keyword or keyword phrase that receives over 100,000 clicks per month there are a few basic things you should know. First and foremost is the value of incoming links and the sites in which these links come from. Many feel that reciprocal linking is one of the best methods to promote your site. Over and over I have found that one-way links are much more beneficial. You have a site that has reasonable PR and use it to put links on to point into the site that you want a link back from. But the differences is their link coming back points into a different site of yours in which you're trying to promote. This gives you the benefit of a text link, were called anchor text link passing the credit from their site to your site and you passing a link back to them from another site. In this approach your particular page or site in which you are trying to promote does not have to have a link pointing back to them. This keeps more PR for your pages in which you're trying to market and also allows your important pages not to have miscellaneous outgoing links that do not pertain to the keyword phrase in which they are trying to market.

One of the great benefits of one-way Link exchange is the factor of time. Many of the sites in which you do link exchange with continue to increase in PR and then ranking. Typically the sites that do link exchange that are of good quality have a reason to continue in their marketing efforts and as time goes on your text link on their site becomes more and more valuable. This is not a short-term approach by any means, but it is highly effective in which I've seen top engine ranking on some of the toughest keywords that you can find just from using this approach. Yes there is other basics about how the pages are written and also the internal linking of the site are all very important, but not near as important as links. As you know when working with Google there is a timeframe that you must meet in excess of 90% of the time on any keyword that has value. This time frame is usually around six months before they will allow you to rank any type of traffic keyword with any reasonable positioning unlike Yahoo.

Google will rank sites based upon the quantity and quality of the link. People believe that the content of the site that is pointing a link to you is important. In most all cases I have found that the content is not important. Yes many of you are going to say this is not correct, but I can show it on site after site without a doubt. You can find links or trade links on other sites that are not content related and benefit from them immensely

Here's a little trick if you have some time to waste and do not understand the power of links with search engines. This will prove effective immediately for Yahoo getting you ranking in three weeks or less on your keyword. With Google this method also works but again there is that time constraint you have to keep in mind. Take a site the you already have in place and put a page on it for a new keyword that you're seeking or an alternative of the keyword that you're currently using. Spend 10 or more hours pointing blogs into that page using a text link that follows directly in relation with the keyword that you are trying to market. If the keyword phrase that you are after is a gray cat's, then make sure that the link from the blog pointing to your great cats page says great cats in the link. This page in which you perform this test on honestly does not even need 20 words. It can be black-and-white with no outgoing links to any other page on your site or any other sites period. Based upon what the traffic as of this keyword and how difficult the competition is you can actually make this rank on page 1 with Yahoo in less than one month. What kind of SEO work is this? It is considered black Seo and can cause you to have some complications in the future. In this article I do not have time to cover the ways around this and I am just using this as an example, don't let some Seo company talk you into believing that this cannot be done, because it's done each and every day by thousands of web sites throughout the world.

In short you can build many many sites and use different linking strategies to promote one or more sites with them, or you can do link exchange, preferably one-way links. In time this approach with a well-designed site that has good content and is not an artificial front end for another site will produce excellent results in your quest to get top positioning on the engines.

Self trained, starting at the bottom of the ladder, and reaching the top of Google and Yahoo on keyword phrases sought after by multimillion dollar companies from my own bedroom. You can believe what you have read here, or you can spend a fortune having someone else do this task for you, but one way or another it is work, and it takes a lot of time and effort. I wish you luck and prosperity. Internet Business

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/