AltaVista
(Provides results to AltaVista) Purchase at: Altavista Submit a Site

Benefits:

• Upon submission, your pages will make it into the AltaVista index within 2 business days.
• Your pages are respidered every 24 hours.
• The term of the pay inclusion program is 6 months.
• Reporting services are included, such as tracking submissions and transactions through their online Account Management Center.
• The audience reach of AltaVista, according to Nielsen NetRatings in October 2002, was: AltaVista: 4.4% . Source: SearchEngineWatch.com
• Cost? $39 for the first URL, and $29 each for 2-10 URL's, then $19 each for 11 to 500 URLs. So, the total cost for our three pages for **six months** would be $97. The cost per year would be $194.

Downside:
AltaVista's pay inclusion is more expensive than the others, and AV doesn't have the coverage that some of the other engines have. Plus, their pay inclusion program is only for six months, as compared to a full year with the other programs.

So, you'll have to decide whether you feel it's worth the cost.

AltaVista is the one engine where you can still use their free add URL without being placed into the same category as the huge group of "free add URL spammers," because AltaVista's free add URL process doesn't allow mass submissions. Instead, their unique "puzzle submission" process requires you to enter a submission code into the submission box, and you can only submit five URLs at no cost. So, if you want to use free add URL for one of the engines, AltaVista's is the one to use.

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Total Costs So Far
With our example, considering that this is a brand new Web site with zero visibility, we'll figure out the cost for our three pages based on using AltaVista's pay inclusion program and on not using their program.

Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Without AltaVista:
$221 (for 3 pages) (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves. This does NOT include AltaVista.)

Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs With AltaVista:
$415 (for 3 pages) (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista.)

Yahoo!

You might be wondering why I haven't listed the Yahoo! directory in this listing of pay inclusion programs. With the way that Yahoo! now displays results, which are almost a duplication of Google results, the importance of submitting to the Yahoo! directory at a yearly cost of $299 has diminished. Depending on where things go from here with Yahoo!, having purchased the Inktomi engine, this is subject to immediate change. But, at this point in time, paying to be included in the Yahoo! directory isn't anywhere near as important as it once was. If you have good visibility in Google, you should have good visibility in Yahoo!.

But, our site is brand new, and the advantage to Yahoo!'s pay inclusion program is that your site will be reviewed for possible inclusion within 7 working days. So, depending on our finances, we may want to add Yahoo!'s pay inclusion costs, just so we can get fast visibility for our new site.

(According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audience reach of Yahoo! was 28.5%. Source: SearchEngineWatch.com

Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs
Including Yahoo!, but not AltaVista: $520 (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo!. This does NOT include AltaVista.)

Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs
Including both Yahoo! and AltaVista: $714 (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and AltaVista.)

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What About Google?

Google is the only major engine that doesn't have a pay inclusion program. So, the only way to get your pages into the index is to let the spider find the pages on its own through links on other pages or to submit through Google's free add URL.

Personally, I always let the spider find the pages on its own and never submit to Google manually. By going this route, while your site is busy being spidered by the other engines and you're busy building link popularity, by the time that Google "finds" your pages, you should have had time to build some link popularity, which we all know is so important with Google.

According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audience reach of Google alone was 29.2%. Add to that AOL at 19.7%, Yahoo! at 28.5%, and Netscape at 5.5%, and it's quite easy to see the power behind Google. Source: searchenginewatch.com

In Conclusion

Rather than worrying about submitting your pages manually to each of the major engines, take advantage of the tremendous benefits of using pay inclusion.

Then, let Google find your pages on its own, and hold off submitting to the Yahoo! directory for a while.

Based on our example here, if we were submitting three pages, our total yearly cost would be either $221 or $415, depending on whether or not we chose to use AltaVista's pay inclusion program.

So, as you can see, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Repeating what I said earlier in this article, the "key" to successful submissions these days can be summed up in two words: pay inclusion.

About The Author
Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists, has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses and is the content provider for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software. She also teaches 2-, 3-, and 5-day hands-on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops.

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