More Internet Marketing FAQs
Some internet marketing services offer 'pay for placement' schemes. Is this a good idea?
No, not in our opinion. Here are some of the reasons why.
a) From the web site owners' point of view there's the question of which search engines the rankings are achieved on. Do you know the Internet well enough to be sure that the ones the marketer targets truly represent the best options for your site to be found on? There are hundreds of search engines and some are easier than others to achieve good rankings on. So there is a risk that the results achieved on a 'pay for placement' scheme, whilst on the face of it look good ("we've got 10 top 10 rankings right now!"), they might not in reality represent much of an audience for your site when compared to the true potential.
b) Some 'pay for placement' schemes ignore the question of Directories and so bypass a substantial proportion of options for increased traffic for their customers' web sites. There used to be just Yahoo but now there's the ODP plus a multitude of dedicated, industrial portals and services directories (eg. UK operated directories Kellysearch, Kompass and Applegate) that have begun to play a role in this in-demand market.
c) From the marketer's
point of view, search engines are constantly evolving, changing algorithms,
refreshing databases and sometimes even suffering 'drop out' errors where
millions of pages are lost for no apparent reason. Hence with the potential
to be so erratic, the internet marketer risks having invested a lot of
work for possibly no reward. The radical changes in the Google algorithm
in the last 2-3 years are testimony to the challenges
that marketers sometimes have to deal with. The SEO forums have never
been so busy!