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Introduction to Trusted Feed Pay Per Click Programs For Large (250+ page) Sites

With the exception of Google most search engines aren't very good at indexing your entire website. It may in fact be impossible for you to get Inktomi (owned by YAHOO!, supplies secondary results to MSN and some other smaller engines), AltaVista, FAST, and Ask Jeeves/Teoma to index your whole site if you make extensive use of non alphanumeric characters like the ?, &, and = sign. A trusted Feed Program can help you get around these problems without rebuilding your database or even optimizing your website.

You can guarantee thousands of your pages will be in the engines

Trusted Feed programs allow you submit a data feed to the search engines mentioned above. You submit a title, description, and keyword field to FAST and AltaVista. Ask Jeeves and Inktomi also require a field for what would normally be the content of your page. Essentially you send each search engine a data set that represents each page you want to include in the search engine. The search engine then matches that dataset to a web page on in your site and ranks your site based on the data feed instead of the page content which may be inaccessible by any other means.

It's gonna cost you

Larger sites with at least 200 pages can get free inclusion through Trusted Feed programs and pay per click instead. Typical click charges start at about $0.15 and may go as high as $0.50 depending on the keyword category and search engine. If your site generates revenue and you can afford the click prices, Trusted Feed can be a phenomenal way to generate tons of highly targeted traffic to your site.

But maybe not as much as you think

When it comes to guaranteeing specific pages of your website will be included in a search engine, small sites typically pay to up to $78.00 per year, per engine for each page. A site with just a few thousand pages could end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just for inclusion of all those pages in the four engines that offer the service. The pay for inclusion programs guarantee no traffic and each page much be optimized to get have a chance to attain top rankings and referrals.

It's still a lot of work

Like most search engine marketing programs, a Trusted Feed program can require a significant amount of time and effort to setup. While it's not necessary to modify the actual site, the data that represents each page needs to be compiled, formatted and optimized to attain top rankings in the search engines. If you site is database driven (and it probably is if it contains hundreds or thousands of pages) you'll need to do lots of keyword research and write some queries to pull information out of your database and create optimized title, description, and keyword tags as well as a field that represents your content. If Inktomi is one of the engines you are going to use you may want to create a spider that will identify keywords where top rankings in the Inktomi database will appear on the first or second page of results and not be buried under pages of LookSmart results.

But the benefits can be huge

Once your feed is setup and running, not only will you (possibly) get lots of highly targeted search engine referrals but you'll generate lots of keyword data that may be used for other pay per click advertising programs. Since the engines refresh the data feed on a weekly basis you'll have the opportunity to make changes, add more pages and otherwise improve your results on a regular basis.

And not just in the Trusted Feed programs

Once you've generated all this data and have unique title, description, and keyword tags, create appropriate fields for them in your site (if necessary) and put them back into your site. Assuming Google can crawl and index your site, unique title, description, and keyword tags will help improve your rankings in Google. Engines that offer Trusted Feed programs probably account for around 20-30% of total search engine traffic in the US. Google accounts for most of the rest.

Don't forget the tracking

After all this work, it's worth the investment to track it. At minimum, use something like WebTrends to verify the traffic the engines charge you for, or better yet, use a script based tracking service that is likely to be much more accurate. Learn more in to introduction to site analytics and ROI Tracking or check out the section on site analytics vendors.

If you are ready to move on to optimizing your actual website for more "organic" search engine referrals, check out the keyword optimization section.

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