Paid submissions are mainly geared towards those who don't have the expertise to optimize their sites, but want to get "garanteed" ranking. Notice I placed garaunteed in quotations. Nothing is really garaunteed, but this is most effective when paying search engine companies for listings, rather than SEO Professionals, which can cost a very high dollar for their services offered. Alternative to paying for search engine listings through Search Engine Companys such as Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc, you can accomplish the same and sometimes better than those who pay for their submissions, if you have the knowledge required to do so.pauld wrote:So why do so many companies still pay to have their domain name submitted to google and '2000 other search engines' on a monthly basis! Just because they all do it, does not mean it is right.
Your statement isn't all that together on the subject, since the fact remains that both are a valid optional choice. You can either pay for the service or with the right person or know how you can do it yourself or have someone do it for you. There is no right or wrong, it's simply paying the service for or doing it yourself.
I wasn't really stating that it makes a super huge difference, but it can make a difference. I agree, the structure is "key" and yes results may vary, but it has more to do with a person's knowledge of SEO. Search Engine Optomization should, in today's internet world, be considered from the very start of a website. It should be the first thing that one goes over when discussing the scope of a website project with the client.pauld wrote:The structure of the design is very important in my opinion for SEO. Your designs may naturally lend themselves to it. However, my own experiences of seo urls is not the same as yours, resulting in no improvement in listings or traffic. I think subjective experiences here could differ considerably.
For websites to truely get optimal ranking you majority key factors are: Content !Important, Link Structure, Back-linking, SEF URL Structure, etc. If a website doesn't have alot of content i may be more benfificial to pay Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc directly for listings. One website example was WA007.com, back in 2003-2004 their website was entirely flash driven and as far as valid content consistant with seo, it was minimal, this is where paid ranking comes into play. I have also heard the argument that paid ranking doesn't place you any higher than doing it yourself, well that again, depends on your working knowledge of SEO. Search Engine Companies are bias and they can manipulate the Search Engine Crawler to index sites differently than others. This is one of the ways that Companies such as; Google, MSN Live, and Yahoo make their money.
It basically comes down to this. No SEF Urls may not make a huge difference, but they do infact make a difference. The degree of that difference is what should be measured. It's something that not only differs from designer to designer, but also from website to website. The importance of the option to atleast be able to make use of SEF Urls when it really can make a difference is a good thing, it gives the designer a piece of mind. Also, in closing I just want to note that we as designers/ developers know that the rules that has always esisted is that when it comes to search eingine crawlers, they simply do not recognize things not relavant to your website, such as: www.yoursite.com/category1/product1/productname.html, but they do like to see things like: www.yoursite.com/toys/trucks.html or www.yoursite.com/toys/trucks/. It's all about relevance.
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