Paid Inclusion - the Forgotten Tool in the Search Engine Marketer's Toolkit?

I was recently at a function where a number of search engine marketers were talking to an audience of traditional marketers explaining the benefits of search engine marketing. The focus of these Search Engine Marketers was:

1. Pay for placement bidding (P4P); and
2. Search engine optimization.

Not once was paid inclusion mentioned and this did surprise me greatly, as paid inclusion - when used properly - can drive cost effective, quality traffic. Has it been forgotten by search engine marketers or is it simply being ignored because Yahoo! is the last tier 1 search engine supporting it?

Paid inclusion comes in two forms:

1. Per URL (Yahoo! Search Submit); and
2. Bulk Feed (Yahoo! Search Submit Pro).

Paid inclusion results appear in the organic / SERPS (Search Engine Results PageS), mixed in with the other crawled results. I am not going to debate the ethics of paid inclusion but rather show why smart search engine marketers take advantage of the program to beat their competition.

Paid inclusion does have many benefits that may not be apparent at first glance. In a series of 5 posts, I will look at the benefits of paid inclusion whilst dispelling some of the myths surrounding this valuable tool.

Posted by Warren Duff at 5:18 AM GMT