Best of the ISP-Lists

Selling Search Services

Members of the ISP-Webhosting discuss the benefits and headaches of offering search engine submission to webhosting clients.

[January 16, 2002]

On the ISP-Webhosting list in January, GS inquired,

"Can anyone recommend a good search engine submission company whose services we can offer to our web hosting customers?"

A number of respondents suggested that it's easiest to just handle it yourself:

[PP advised] "Do it yourself and charge them for it. Why pay somebody else to do it? Results are going to be about the same as using a service, maybe even better."

[BS added] "It's actually very simple to do, and it requires absolutely no trickery of any type, nor any special talents. Anyone can learn how to do it in about an hour. It's a simple matter of creating targeted pages that the search engines can properly deal with."

[SS agreed] "The results of doing it yourself are usually much better. It doesn't take a whole lot of time, and you can actually guarantee results."

MH warned that it can be a lot more trouble than it's worth:

"This is one of the most frustrating services I have ever tried to offer in my life. Your customers are going to buy the service, then start calling you and griping that their site is not listed. So much of why an engine finds your site is not based on anything you have control over. Anyone who actually gets traffic to their site knows darn well it takes endless hours of tweaking before you see results. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole!"

Others noted that quality is much more important than quantity:

[AS observed] "It's not how many times or how well you submit; it's the web site and how it's constructed that determines your ranking in search engines."

[RG added] "Optimization is the key to it. A good search engine optimization provider will analyze your content for keyword density and give unique content in the home page, all for the search engines to index properly. Search engines want to have relevant search criteria for their users-and text is all the search engines can read, so it has to be right the first time."

[RM agreed] "Submission alone is useless. Your site must be content rich and have all optimization markers in place before you even think of submitting it. Each engine has different formulas and algorithms they utilize in order to calculate your relevance. Submitting your clients' sites without optimizing them first would be an injustice, and won't earn you any client retention in the long run."

—End