It's something I've often wondered about over the last couple of years, and could determine whether a good site survives or dies.
The Yahoo £200 directory submission fee is of dubious value for many sites.
Overture and the other PPC engines often have CPC rates far too high for some site owners to compete. The mimimum fee of 10p (or 5p) can immediately cut out a swathe of potential advertisers who have much smaller margins per visitor.
PFI is perhaps the worst value for most sites, IMHO, but does work for some sites.
I don't consider the free traffic from Google and Yahoo to be too expensive.
One senario would be for someone to set up a SE Watchdog (not Search Engine Watch) that can fight on behalf of advertisers.
Like what we have for Mobile Phones industry perhaps.
It's Greed pure and simple. It seems that all Yahoo etc is prepared to do is to give free spidered listings, but of course there's no guarantee if or when you will be listed.
Thereby forcing you to buy the paid listings - so in actual fact they aren't giving you anything good.
hmmmmmmmm I wonder if someone will come along and change that?
i also know sites where £0.10 per click makes significant amounts of money.
Much of the art of SEO is making sure your target markt fits your budget and vice versa.
PPC can be expensive but can be used well with the right CPCs on the right products.
Let's face it, the best free traffic I know is from Link exchanges, not the SE's. I'd rather have 50 good links than a Paid listing from Yahoo (at the moment anyway).
I suppose I get around 30'000 hits per month, but none even enquire about my services - using SE methods that is!
Na, I don't see the point in Paying £500 + to even get in a targeted category these days. It's a well known fact that basic entries just don't cut it anymore - oh yeah, you can be searched, but that's not great exposure is it. And when you are amongst 200 + other same entry sites, what chances are there of you being seen or clicked on?
I think the answer is to have many little ads, placed in targeted publications, which have a larger than average readership. To start the ball rolling, so to speak.
I think Googles biggest mistake was getting rid of it's box style ads in the search results - I liked those, and I bet many others liked the format too.
You have to find a balance of cheap advertising against quality readership, and if possible get it for Free!
PPC and links can add to your traffic levels. I guess it depends on what kind of site you have.
It's quite strange that people go on and on about how great Free SE traffic is and yet I have proof that it isn't.
I think traffic is generated more by popularity of a site/company than any traffic that SE's can provide alone.
[edited by: IanTurner at 10:36 am (utc) on June 1, 2004]
[edit reason] <no specifics> [/edit]
If you accept submissions then maybe your keywords should be more aimed at 'all url' etc.
I can see why a lot of your traffic will come from links now.
[edited by: IanTurner at 10:38 am (utc) on June 1, 2004]
[edit reason] no specifics [/edit]
My keywords are fully optimised, and contain the most popular words: Web Promotion, Web Site Promotion, Advertising, Search Engines etc etc etc.
It's been a constant battle to finally get into Google Search, and even now I'm not in Google's directory, which is very strange in itself?
So after 3 websites and 4 years on I (and many others I'm sure) have lost all interest in these Free entries -as they quite clearly useless.
I'm not advertising yet, as there is more work to be done to the site, but will be worth the wait to get it perfect.
Now that Google is dealing with the "spamectories", it will become much harder to get the free traffic, which should be a good thing for the quality of Google SERPs.
Cheers
I don't care if it's Overture or whatever, they quite clearly profit from their brand name. And if that's just the average charge then what would it be for those top keywords?
Okay - this is what advertisng costs. There are cheaper solutions out there.
I guess most webmasters would want at least 3'500ish visitors for that sort of spend.
