These days there are So many ways to promote your websites. One of the most efficient (and easy) is paid inclusion with the search engines that offer it. Search engines (SE's) are the first place most new webmasters go to because they don't know what else to do to promote their sites. If no one can find your site, then you won't be doing any business with it. There's enormous competition for nearly every search term you can think of so you need to be found and to be found - you need to be on the first page (2nd page at the very least!)

Most search engines have paid inclusion. As you probably know, this means you pay either a one-time fee to get indexed within a specific amount of time (usually within 24 hours) or the other common option of a type of paid inclusion is *pay-per-click*. This is where it gets a bit tricky and where you either are spending your advertising dollars for Results; or you are simply throwing your money down the tube.

Each SE has an automated program called a "spider". Spider-bots index all web pages they find and are free. To make Sure your site(s) are indexed by these bots, you need to include a robots text file into your html. So the only issue is ... How Fast do you Need to get indexed? How long do you want to make sure that you STAY indexed?

Search engines offering paid URL inclusion use an extra spider-bot specifically designed to index the pages you have paid for. The difference between the *FREE spider* and the *FEE spider* are fairly obvious.

Free-spiders index webpages for free and are pretty slow (like 4 to 8 weeks or more). The Fee-spider index only those pages you have paid a fee for and speed as well as guaranteed inclusion; and will index your page(s) right away.

Some of these paid inclusions also say that they will re-index your sites pages for 6 months or a year, once a month or what ever their terms are. So if you are adding pages to your site(s)- they get indexed much faster. Having back-links on your pages is also a BIG bonus.

How relevant the cost factor is will probably depend on your companies budget. One disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and AOL, do not provide paid URL inclusion.

Yahoo used to have paid inclusion at about $200.00 way back in the day but not anymore. This means that the search engines you choose to pay will amount to a basic dribble of traffic to your site on a day to day basis. Personally, I find paid inclusion to be better than pay-per-click by far; but not as beneficial as massive back-links and having the robot text set correctly in your html.

Also, if you decide to go the fee route, it really IS necessary to keep paying the fee as it keeps your pages in the SE's index. If you don't, you run the risk that at the end of the pay period, with some search engines, your page(s) may get removed from their index for a certain amount of time or even permenantly.

An advantage of paid inclusion is the rapid reindexing benefit; especially if you are adding pages on a consistant basis; which you should be. Also, it is Very Important to note that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the Free spiders probably won't find your pages AT ALL.

Google generally appears to update its index every month. You have to wait for the Google spider to come by and pay a visit to your pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their indexes on a daily basis. If you are lucky, you may submit a few days before the spiders go out and get indexed quicker I have heard; but I'm not convinced of this. Be aware that it is only after Google updates their index that your webpages show up in Yahoo or AOL as well.

One Key Method to help you decide to pay or not.... Find out if the SE's have already indexed your pages. To do this, enter some of your keywords and see what bubbles up. You can also do the search by putting some of your keywords in quotes. NOTE: If your pages appear when you enter your web address but not when you enter your keywords, using paid inclusion won't help you.

This is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the regular free spiders. Unfortunately, this does NOT mean your ranking will be very high. If this is the case, your money would be better spent on properly updating your pages to improve your rankings in search results. Once you have managed that you can then think about using paid URL inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the free spiders tocrawl your pages again.

If you are selling an inexpensive produc requiring a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best investment for you; the biggest search engines do not provide it, and they are the ones that will bring you the majority of your traffic. If you have a business offering an expensive service or product and requires very *targeted* traffic to your site, a paid inclusion is probably your best investment.

Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently. If your content changes on say; a weekly basis, paid URL inclusion will make certain your new pages are indexed often and very quickly. The new content is indexed by the fee-spider and then appears when new relevant keywords are searched on.

Also, dynamically generated pages are often difficult for free-spiders to find and index. Paying to include the most important pages of your dynamically generated site insures the Fee-spiders will index them.

Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the possibility.

Paid inclusion also guarantees your pages are indexed and if they are inadvertently dropped, the Fee-based spiders will be watching for them to get them reindexed as quickly as possible. ONE (just one of many) examples of a paid for inclusion is at: Exactseek. They say they will be able to: "Add your URL to 40+ Search Engines and Increase Your Traffic, Sales and Backlinks in 3 Easy Steps!" (I am NOT sure what the (+) means at all...?)

BEGIN QUOTE from their site "Submit your site to the ExactSeek Rapid Paid Inclusion program and it will appear in the organic search results of our search engine partner network within just 48 hours! And, we'll ensure your listing stays fresh by re-indexing it every 48 hours for a full year.

Rapid Paid Inclusion is probably the easiest and fastest submission service you'll ever use - just enter your URL and we'll do the rest, and within just 48 hours!

Our network receives more than 120 million monthly searches. Add one URL for only $24.95 US for a full year and additional URLs for just $14.95/year. Sign Up for an account and increase your traffic, sales and backlinks today!" END QUOTE

BTW, I get nothing, NADA for mentioning them - it is just an example I feel is important for this article.

I hope this blathering of mine is somewhat helpful. I realize after re-reading it that I should be explaining back-linking, pay-per-click and dynamically generated web-pages but I do have hubs on those so I'll link to them. Sometimes I'm not so hot at explaining things.

Best Regards, M/

Lol! I always liked the sound of "spray and pray". It's a very old advertising term meaning basicly that you have No plan of action; you have X amount of dollars to spend and you just throw it out there to the wind and see what happens!

This never did work very well but now, on the Internet, it simply doesn't work. So please, don't use it. Make a great plan of action that makes sense, stick to it - modify when necessary and you should do just fine!