[thelist] need web marketing advice

Hello All,

At 10:32 25.03.00 -0700, 
Alan wrote some good stuff I totally agree with, 
and recommend to do but:

>Manually submitting sites is a labor intensive operation.
>A typical submission will take between 10-30 mins per engine depending on
>your level of expertise and where your placement will be.

I think your time estimate is a bit high, it usually takes me
about 1 and a half hours to submit a page to all bigger engines
and directories, niche and special interest pages by hand.
But as I do this trying to make a living of it, I may be faster
and have some tricks.

>Using submission software is faster but has a higher initial cost.
>WPG has taken no more than 2 hours to submit to the top 15 search engines.
>It also runs in the background and so you can do other work while it is
>running.

While I agree with the usefulness of WPG in some parts,
I still think manual submission is important if you really want
results. Submission software is not the best to make
submissions, imho.
Not only to the search engines do not like less page visits,
but also a software can not check for special and niche
sites. Again, WPG is not bad, but still to get to the most actual
search engine submission form, you should look their manually..
not wait for your software to update (which took pretty long in some
cases with WPG).

To me it is like hand coding vs. wyswig, yes, you can also make
results with WYSWIG, but when you really want good results
and know what is going on, you must do it by hand
from the beginning.
When it comes to checking positions I also trust more what I see.
I have WPG, but I do not use it anymore.

>using a submission service has its own pitfalls.
>A lot of submission services generate huge amounts of spam wanting you to
>become members of various MLM schemes.

Oh, you said a lot..ok..I thought you said all, sorry! ;)
I know that there are good ones..

>You get what you pay for here.

Always. If you hire me it will cost more then some automatic
"Submit to 1000 engines and FFA" thing, but as in design,
people do not always seem to want quality.
Kind like a "hey, I can do Word, I am a web designer" thing.
Or Geocities is free, why should I pay for hosting and a real
domain name.

>> What are you all doing in this regard?
>We also submit by hand to specialized directories dependant on client
>market.

All by hand submissions.

thanks for letting me rant,

.wolf

<tip type="loose pr tips, link policy for relevance rating" author=".wolf">
One of the most underestimated search engine submission tactics
is to get other people to link to you. 
Yes, you read right, search engine tactic.

Not only should you have a "link
statement" where you allow people to link to your site if they want,
with code ready to copy for easiness of the linker, but also
look for other sites that might have an interest in featuring your site.
With now also special niche directories for example cheese eating, you can
be sure
that there are sites which are glad to know of your site, if it has
interest for them.
Of course, assuming all the time the site is ready and full of good content.
And that you know how to find those niche sites.

This does not only give you some interested visitors from targeted user
groups,
but also adds your relevance ratings, which luckily more engines use,
to stop the spamming of their indexes with automatic programs and Hundreds
of doorway pages.
</tip>

self-promoting plug:
mailto:rankhigh@webrom.net