My site is a holiday rental site if that has anything to do with that?
Hope You can give me an idea!
Kindly!
Claus
Might be a better investment - you can always test it out with say $20 and see what the response is like.
Leslie
google adwords
overture.com
espotting.com
In my own efforts, espotting and overture have given very little results.
Anyone more experienced with the uk market?
I assume we are talking about 'paid entry' rather than 'bid-per-click'.
It used to be a Yahoo UK listing that gave the best ROI.
Now its difficult to know which way to jump until we know what is going to happen with Yahoo and Inktomi.
I suspect we will have a better idea before January is through.
Use what you think is useful:
Using wordtracker and create 1000's of keywords.
Place each of these words within [] and run a google adwords campaign for the uk. This will give you figures for the best searched keywords.....look at searches not clicks.
Bid on adwords, epotting-uk,overture-uk for all words with searches from adwords campaign....monitoring the bids with bidrank.
Tune pages to match the most searched on adwords, one page per keyword.
Submit to Yahoo.co.uk, Looksmart.co.uk and dmoz. Make sure the words in your description have as many as possible from the adwords list, but do not put more than 15 words and do not go overboard by stuffing.
Manually submit for free to normal engines.
Keep creating content.....
That is our approach now on all campigns.
Good luck.
Doug
dougs, your approach is the high-budget route, which burglar may or may not be in a position to tread.
For a low-budget campaign, the first thing is to do is to submit to get a dmoz listing. Be sure to submit in the appropriate category - that is, the most specific you can find where your site will fit.
Then... well, it gets more complicated. yahoo used to be by far the best investment, but now it's less sure because we don't know what yahoo is going to be showing. It may well be, burglar, that you would do better investing a bit monthly in a ppc system, than in paying yahoo to get listed (yahoo.com and yahoo.co.uk use the same database, by the way, so you pay once to get included in both)
looksmart.co.uk? Does that really bring in much, dougs?
We have paid inclusion with Inktomi.. but I was wondering if that really was the best route to take.
Having poked around on the forums a little bit, and out&about on the web, would going to Overture be a better idea (given that it gets us listed on MSN & AOL), rather than going for Google Adwords (which 'only' gets us listed there)..
What do people think? if it was a choice of one or the other (and what about the relative costs between one or the other?)
Thanks for any insight :)
Kindly!
Claus
overture and espotting are giving me good results for most campaigns. google adwords is very expensive - 20 times the cost per click of overture. yahoo.co.uk still seems like a good move to me, even if their directory listings aren't shown by default right now. you get a good, high value link to your site.
you can also get in msn.co.uk through overture, if you pick the right terms and pay the right money.
Hey, sorry, Crazy_Fool (that's too much fun to say to *not* repeat your moniker!), but I'm not familiar with the UK SEO market - what is it that looksmart uk is doing that is unpleasant?
So I'd guess as bidsmart is closing mid January they will continue to use Espotting as it's a good revenue stream with low overheads for them.
On it's own, Looksmart's Bidsmart traffic was very low - I was number 1 for a top 20 generic search word. Small traffic over a month, had problems burning my £50.
My 2ps worth.
Good luck getting that cheap traffic!
Because it was a partnership between BT (experts in phones) and Looksmart (experts in search.... although some will argue that point), you have to say that maybe the direction they wanted to go was different.
Looksmart have got a very strong, long term committment from MSN to be the provider of search traffic through MSN.co.uk. They will be losing the syndicated partners like NTL, Tiscali, BT Openworld and Freeserve (the last one being the only one of merit).
Yahoo UK has always been a good provider of residual traffic, both from the directory itself and through searches. For £199 as a one off it's a no-brainer in my opinion.
Where people come unstuck is in the submission. You often get people bad mouthing the provider (Yahoo in this case) when really the blame lies in the directory cateogry they are in, which is wrong for them, and although the editorial team have the ultimate sanction on that, they try wherever possible to use what you suggest. But, and it's a big but (J Lo), Yahoo editors don't care about any traffic you get. You pay them to review your site, that's it, not to deliver 300 visitors a day or anything like that.
Going way back to the original poster.
Popular in UK are Google, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Freeserve, but horses for courses apply, you need broad exposure. One submission alone will not do it, but if you had £200 I'd go with Yahoo.
It'd be a real pain to pay the money and then see them switch to the stupid system of looksmart.com!
The actual Looksmart Looklistings is excellent in my opinion. The bad bit was the fact they moved the goalposts and didn't grandfather all those that had paid for a directory listing. They had a sever credibility issue at the time but they seem to have weathered the storm and it's more of an even keel now.
For US clients that we use Looklistings for the results are as good as, if not better, than those they got from the directory.
My site is a holiday rental site if that has anything to do with that?
From personal experience where I have good rankings on all uk engines for such a travel related site, I believe that Yahoo is currently the only one that will deliver you any traffic worth mentioning.
My advice FWIW is to ignore the rest.
Having poked around on the forums a little bit, and out&about on the web, would going to Overture be a better idea (given that it gets us listed on MSN & AOL), rather than going for Google Adwords (which 'only' gets us listed there)..
Overture do not have AOL, Google have AOL as one of their sydicated partners.
As to which will give the best results, it depends on your industry, your implementation, your objectives, your budget. In some instances Google works out much more expensive for certain keywords than Overture, but then Google may not convert as well or it may.
Why not try both?
