Submitting Web sites to search engine directories (as opposed to listings) is a manual, labor-intensive process. Human editors review submissions' quality and content to determine if they will be accepted in a directory. Stringent submission guidelines (and pricing, when relevant) vary between search engines. Submission volume is enormous, and editors are increasingly selective. More popular (and populated) categories are more difficult to penetrate.
Directory categories and sub-categories are determined prior to submission as are listing factors like regional directories, which can increase chances of acceptance. Sites in categories with relatively fewer listings are more apt to be selected. Most search engines utilize other search engine listings, so directory submissions are made only to major search engines.
Also known as paid indexing and paid spidering, the service now exists at most search engines. Paid inclusion guarantees your site is kept in a search engine's database and is regularly indexed. The benefit to paying for inclusion is that it ensures a site's title and description are regularly updated in a search engine. Users always see the most current listing. It's also used to test titles and descriptions to see which achieve more click-throughs, and for sites that tweak their HTML code to achieve a better ranking with the search engine's algorithm. A company that provides paid listing management should be monitoring the effectiveness of your search engine campaigns and making adjustments to improve the results you acheive.
Every major search engine accepts paid listings. Search engine advertising guarantees a site appears in the top results for specified search terms within a day or less of making the agreement. Costs and pricing models vary, including pay-per-click and pay-per-impression. Listings can be single or multiple URLs. Paid listings build visibility quickly, and can function as a long-term advertising option. A company that provides paid listing management should be monitoring the effectiveness of your search engine campaigns and making adjustments to improve the results you acheive.
Building inbound links through reciprocal link exchanges can increase traffic and improve a site's visibility in search engines by boosting link popularity. Link popularity measures how many other sites hyperlink to yours, a criterion in search engine ranking results. Quality and reputation of linking sites is a factor: a link from the "New York Times" scores higher than a link from a personal Web page.
Web site design: content, navigation and meta-tags that are relevant and informative, play a role in the ability of a search engine to find and include a site in its listings. Frames, Java, Flash, database-driven Web sites, active-server pages and CGI scripts hinder this process. Search engine friendly design enables search engines to find information about your site quickly and effectively.
Some vendors provide hosting services for pages they optimize. Traffic redirects to your site from their server. Optimization of a home page (or entire site) can be an ongoing process. Hosting on a SEO provider's server facilitates the access to the pages in question.
Cloaking (IP delivery or stealth scripts) is a technique where a search engine spider is shown a page different than what a human being would see. Sometimes this is done because a company has created a page that might please a search engine's ranking algorithms but which looks "ugly" to a human visitor. Other times, content from a database might be fed to search engines through "trusted feed" programs. This direct feed will differ from that which a human sees, when a database is used to assemble an actual web page. Cloaking might be used for other reasons, as well. Google has an outright ban on cloaking. If it is detected, it could cause the cloaked page or the entire web site to be removed from Google. The other major crawler-based search engines tend to frown on cloaking unless it is done via their paid inclusion programs, where they are usually more tolerant of it, if the cloaked pages are not misleading and don't violate other spam guidelines they may have. Paid inclusion via XML feeds inherently involves cloaking, and this tends to be the most accepted form.