In Light of the Alliance Between Excite and FindWhat...
...tips for More Visibility with Excite!
Part 2

By Robin Nobles

In Part 1 of this article, we covered FindWhat's alliance with
Excite and where those results are shown. Let's continue with
additional advantages to using FindWhat.

Besides more visibility in Excite, the cost of purchasing
keywords through FindWhat is considerably less than purchasing
keywords through GoTo, as a general rule. For example, at the
time of this writing, the top site in FindWhat for the keyword
phrase "life insurance" was paying $.06 a click through. However,
the top site at GoTo went for $3.02 a click through. Quite a
difference.

While you can certainly argue that GoTo's impressive list of
partners makes it worth your while to pay more for GoTo keywords,
and you'd be right, many companies can't afford the skyrocketing
prices and they're looking for alternate solutions. With
FindWhat's alliance with Excite, FindWhat has become a very
attractive alternative.

Tips for Purchasing Keywords through FindWhat

If you're currently buying keywords through GoTo, those same
general principles apply to FindWhat. However, Craig Pisaris-
Henderson offers these helpful suggestions when purchasing
keywords through FindWhat.com.

"1) Know your product and think like someone who does not know
your product. What I mean is we have many advertisers who choose
keywords and phrases that are familiar to them but not
necessarily familiar to people looking for their product.

"2) Advertisers need to be as descriptive as possible and include
the keywords they are targeting within their title and
description. Users really do rely on titles and descriptions to
further qualify the sites before they click on them, so if the
title and description are not relevant to the search, people will
not click on them and will pass them over to click on their
competitor.

"3) Deliver people to the area of the site they are looking for.
So many people come in and open an account and point all users to
their primary homepage.

"Here is a quick rule of thumb... if someone has to click 3 times
to get to the product or service they are looking for, you've
lost them."

For more tips related to purchasing keywords, read Getting the
Most from GoTo.com
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com/information/goto.html).

A Word to the Wise

If you already have top rankings in Excite for a particular
keyword phrase, save your money and purchase other keywords
instead.

Jim Girardeau of SocialService.com (http://www.socialservice.com)
explains,

"I'm a FindWhat advertiser. Since my site is already listed
fairly well on Excite (#3-#8 on most keywords), and because the
FindWhat paid listings are appearing at the bottom of Excite's
results, I am now paying to have my FindWhat listing appear well
below my free Excite listing!"

So, check your current rankings with Excite. Since FindWhat
results most often appear below regular Excite results, if you're
already in the top 10, consider a different keyword choice in an
area where you need additional coverage.

Keyword Bid Optimizer Now Includes FindWhat.com

For those of you who use the handy Keyword Bid Optimizer
(http://www.academywebspecialists.com/kbo) for keeping track of
your GoTo keyword purchases, FindWhat.com has recently been added
to the tool.

Jon Keel with KBO explains, "We added FindWhat and Ah-ha about
two weeks ago and plan to add Kanoodle, ePilot, Bay 9, 7Search,
GoClick within the next four weeks.

"One of the cool features now is that one can transfer all or
part of his or her keywords from one ppc search engine to the
other and quickly determine current bid amounts and position.

"Also, we'll have functional within several days the ability to
select, from within the particular ppc search engine in question,
which keywords should be actually bid on, generate a spreadsheet
for that ppc, and submit the `bid,' all from within the tool.

"I'm talking with FindWhat tomorrow about getting access to their
database so we can report, as we do with GoTo and Ah-ha, the
previous month's searches for the keywords. This feature is not
available to current FindWhat subscribers as far as we can tell.
This feature will make it more desirable for FindWhat subscribers
so they can check popularity of the keyword(s) in question."

Additional Tips for Getting Found in Excite

With LookSmart providing directory results to Excite, a sure way
of getting more visibility in Excite is to submit your site to
LookSmart.

Also, with Excite recently updating its index, many Web site
owners have found themselves with excellent rankings in the
engine. Bill Gentry of The Selling Source
(http://www.sellingsource.com) offers some suggestions for better
traffic through Excite.

"I looked at traffic to our online casinos earlier this week, and
at least 50 percent of the traffic they are receiving from our
SEO services comes from Excite. I kept submitting pages to them
even though they weren't refreshing the index, and I'm glad I
did. Once Excite did refresh the index, we ended up with so many
listings for dozens of search phrases in Excite, and immediately
started getting significant amounts of pre-qualified, highly
targeted traffic to our online casino clients and related
gambling sites. My advice for getting visible in Excite?
Persistence and patience, and lots of both!"

In Closing, what are FindWhat.com's Plans for the Future?

Pisaris-Henderson answers, "FindWhat.com will continue to be the
online advertisers greatest advocate online. Everything we do is
structured around what helps drive quality targeted traffic to
our advertisers as well as what provides the most convenience, in
terms of management, for our advertisers. In regards to other
alliances, I can not give comment to that outside of stating that
we are constantly evaluating new relationships and will continue
to bring on additional quality distribution partners."

So, if you need more visibility in Excite, consider purchasing
some keywords through FindWhat.com. A small investment could
equal out to an increase in traffic.


This article was written by Robin Nobles, a professional
freelance writer and the Director of Training at the Academy of
Web Specialists (http://www.academywebspecialists.com). Over the
past few years, she has trained several thousand people in her
online and onsite courses in search engine positioning strategies
and has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon.
Visit the Academy's training Web site to learn more about their
online courses: http://www.onlinewebtraining.com.