You will find many search engines on the Internet. Search engines play an important role in promoting any website. They act as the first 'interaction point' for consumers searching the internet for information, products and services. Consequently, the presence of your website in the search results is very important.
It is crucial for websites to appear at the top of search results in order to attract visitors. Many search engines on the internet offer additional services such as "Paid Inclusion" Paid URL Inclusion is a method of search engine marketing where you pay a search engine a certain annual fee to have your web pages included in their index.
Undoubtedly, search engines already have an automated programme known as a "spider" or "crawler" that indexes all the websites it finds online for free. Therefore, whether you pay or not, your web pages will eventually be indexed by search engines if the spider can follow a link to them.
So now the question arises: "Why pay when you can achieve your goal for free?"
Simply because of the 'speed'. With the free integration, it took months for a search engine to index all the pages of your website. However, if you opt for the paid URL inclusion, the search engine uses an additional 'spider' that is programmed to index the paid web pages. The main difference between the free inclusion and the paid inclusion is its speed. The free spider finds your website, follows your links and indexes your pages. However, it may take a few months and you may lose a significant amount of traffic to your website and listings. With Paid URL Inclusion, on the other hand, a paid spider indexes all the pages of your website almost instantly.
The reason for the 'renewal fee':
As already mentioned, with Paid URL Inclusion you have to pay an annual fee to a search engine for indexing your websites. Now the question arises: Why is an "annual renewal fee" necessary if the search engines will eventually index your websites? The cost is necessary to keep your web pages indexed in search results. It is also important to know that many search engines will remove your website from their index for a period of time if you opt for the paid URL inclusion and do not renew it at the end of the payment period.
The advantages of paid URL integration:
- Quick recording:
The biggest advantage is obvious: as soon as you pay for inclusion, your website is immediately indexed by the spider.
- Fast re-indexing:
The sponsored spider will visit your websites regularly, often even daily. This makes it easier to keep your websites up to date in order to improve your rating.
The inclusion of a paid URL also has disadvantages:
- The costs for the inclusion of a paid URL are the biggest disadvantage. Fast/Lycos charges $170 per year for a ten-page website, while AltaVista charges $600.
- Paid URL Inclusion has a limited reachwhich is another decisive disadvantage. Paid URL inclusion is not available on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or AOL. This means that you will only reach a small percentage of your website's visitors. Regardless of whether you opt for Paid URL Inclusion or not, the search engines will ultimately index your website.