With the availability of Google’s Sitemaps, is paid inclusion from Yahoo! Search Submit Pro (SSP) still valuable?
For those unfamiliar with Google’s Sitemaps program, it is Google’s free directed crawl program. Essentially, this valuable product allows website owners to submit a list of URLs they wish Google to index, as well as their suggestions as to how often Google should check back for new content. This is beneficial to website owners because it offers the possibility that Google will find and index deeper website content than it would through a “natural” crawl.
This could be extremely helpful for websites that have “crawlability” issues, or sites with deep content that changes frequently and is often overlooked in a natural crawl. However, Sitemaps offers no guarantees on content indexing or refresh cycles. According to Google, “We don't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. Additionally…we can't make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to our index.”
This is in contrast to the benefits provided by Yahoo! Search Submit Pro. While SSP does have a cost-per-click fee, you get what you pay for. Some of the major benefits of SSP are:
Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done
Indexing
When you submit a page through SSP, you know it will be indexed. Although there is no guarantee of ranking, your page will at least be given the chance to compete.
I recommend: Learn more about
Paid Inclusion.
Guaranteed Refresh Times
If your content changes often enough to warrant it (e.g., retail sites), Yahoo! will re-crawl your feed every day and new content will enter the index every 48 hours.
The biggest difference between the two programs, however, is that with SSP you are actually submitting a data feed which contains only the information you want to include about each URL. For each submitted page, you can submit a display URL, tracking URL, title, description, body, and keyword set. This provides a number of advantages over Sitemaps:
I recommend: Learn more about
Search Engine Optimization.
Keyword Phrase Optimization
While the content in the SSP feed needs to match the content on the website, you can target your content toward keyword phrases that are important to your business, or towards keyword phrases you know will convert. If, for example, you know that a listing for “Polk 6" x 9" 3-Way Speakers” performs better when the targeted keyword phrase is “Polk Speakers,” you can reconfigure your feed to leave the more detailed information in the body and keyword sets, and simply make the title (which is more important for ranking performance) “Find Polk Speakers at Acmeappliance.com.”
I recommend: Learn more about
Keyword Research.
Yahoo! Targeted Optimization
If your SSP provider is skilled in their optimization techniques, you can use your data feed to directly target the Yahoo! ranking algorithm. In other words, you can structure your feed in ways you know will help you rank best in Yahoo!, and then use your actual website to target the Google algorithm.
I recommend: Learn more about
Paid Inclusion Management.
Feed De-optimization
Perhaps the most intriguing, and most often overlooked, optimization technique is de-optimization. If, for example, you know the keyword phrase “Polk Speakers” drives a lot of non-converting traffic, you can restructure your listing to ensure that this combination of words never appears in that order in the listing, instead optimizing for “Polk 6x9 Speakers,” “Polk 3-Way Speakers,” etc.
I recommend: Learn more about
Search Engine Marketing.
Tips & Tactics
Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide
- So, though much of the press over Google’s Sitemaps program is valid and warranted, it is certainly not a replacement for Yahoo!’s paid inclusion. Ideally, participate in both, and wait to see how competition drives the functionality and benefits of both programs.
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