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Learn SEO: Organic, Sponsored & Directory Listings
By Kimberly Bock | March 31, 2008
Organic listings
Crawler based search results are typically the primary elements of search engine results pages. These are also known as
- organic listings
- free listings
- natural listings
- editorial listings
These results are provided by spiders. Spiders are also known as
- crawlers
- robots
They crawl through the web, following link after link, while continuously adding to a massive database of web pages.
Organic listings is what makes SEO shine. They are free of charge and are the predominant factors of the search engine results pages.
For those of us offering pages that are optimized and ranking well organic listings are great news, but let’s face it, the search engine providers need to pay their bills too.
One of the many ways they pay their bills is through sponsored listings.
Sponsored listings
Even the smaller search engines can generate a substantial amount of cash flow by way of sponsored listings.
Meta search engines use sponsored listings as their primary results.
Let’s not overlook the fact that you will likely need a bit of patience with your SEO endeavors at first. The search engines rely on a lot of factors when ranking your site / pages. The finest tuned sites, even by the most seasoned SEOs on the market, can take time to show satisfactory results.
This is when a sponsored listing may be in your best interests. (PPC)
This option will lead consumers to your door. Making certain to offer quality content is imperative to making the sponsored listing investment work for you. Without quality content, you’re wasting money on your PPC campaign. Traffic is good but conversion is the goal. And quality content optimizes that potential.
Directory listings
I’m referring to human edited directory listings such as Yahoo! and DMOZ. (open directory project)
Yahoo! Directory Listing
If you intend to submit your URL to Yahoo! directory listings, they will respond to your request within 7 business days.
The cost of your submission is $299 US if your submission is non-adult content / services related. This will be paid yearly for upkeep.
Cost of submission for adult content / services is $600 US also paid yearly.
Both are non-refundable.
Also note: Yahoo! can opt to deny your request for submission. So remember to read and abide by their terms of service. You wouldn’t want to spend your non-refundable cash for nothing.
DMOZ Directory Listing (open directory project)
Plus: DMOZ does not charge a fee for submission to their directory listings.
Drawback: It can take anywhere from 2 weeks to several months to be listed on sites that use their data. (most likely several months)
Some of the sites which use their data are:
- AOL search
- Netscape search
- Yahoo! search (different than Yahoo! directory listings)
- hundreds of others
Read how to submit a site to DMOZ here.
Other than the obvious advantages of having your website spread across a huge chunk of the internet, directory listings also give your organic ranking a sweet boost. Links from directories score brownie points with search engines.
Well, I hope this was useful to you.
Until later, have fun learning SEO!
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Topics: Search |
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Great explanatory copy for the beginner (and dare I say it) clients alike.
I’ve been reading your blog for a while now, and just wanted to drop you a note to say I really appreciate your plain english (i.e. no jargon) approach.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Thanks for the compliment HannahS. I’m really enjoying this a great deal and am appreciative of your support. After all, it’s a ‘we’ thing.
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Yes, it’s true. Crawler based search results are typically the primary elements of search engine results. Natural SEO is the one of the organic promotion. This job is done by spiders.