by Steven Presar

Are the new pay-per-click search engines worth your time and money? That is, does it make sense to bid on your search engine rank at sites other than the now well established GoTo.com? At this time, most of these new pay-per-click search engines are in a somewhat embryonic state, so in my opinion, that question cannot be answered definitively. However, I can relate to you my own experiences and research, in order that you will be assisted in making an informed decision.

In a previous article entitled "What Are the Right Keywords?", I described how one could use the GoTo.com Search Term Suggestion Box to select keywords appropriate for your Web site, and to ascertain the popularity of these keywords. The GoTo.com Search Term Suggestion Box is useful in two ways:

(1) To select keywords that you intend to bid on at GoTo.com and/or one of the newer pay-per-click search engines.
(2) To select keywords so that you may attempt to optimize your Web pages for search engine crawlers such as the ones associated with sites such as InfoSeek or AltaVista, whether or not you intend to bid on keywords at sites like GoTo.com.

Subsequent to my publishing "What Are the Right Keywords?", I opened a GoTo.com account on behalf of one of my clients who has an investment oriented site. I selected relevant keywords for his home page, and also for his affiliate program. Our experiences with GoTo.com were favorable, so we decided to open an additional account with one of the newer pay-per-click search engines. Of course, the question was: Which one?

By a strange coincidence, as I was pondering this, I received a call on my answering machine which was a solicitation from one of the pay-per-click search engines, FindWhat.com. I decided to return their call (they're at 212-255-1500 in New York City) and spoke to one of FindWhat.com's sales representatives. Although I was favorably impressed, I felt that it would be prudent to do further research. Therefore, I went to Allan Gardyne's new page where he has critiqued a substantial number of the new pay-per-click search engines. After studying that page, I then read two on-line articles concerning this topic. One article featured a rather general discussion of pay-per-click search engines, whereas the other specifically reviewed FindWhat.com. This research gave me sufficient confidence to establish a FindWhat.com account. Subsequently, I bid on appropriate keywords for both my client's hedge fund site and his affiliate program, just as I had previously done at GoTo.com.

Since I only established the FindWhat.com account very recently, I don't have alot of data on how effective it is. However, I was impressed with the ease of establishing that account and also with the tools FindWhat.com supplies you with to manage your account. All in all, if you have established a GoTo.com account and are reasonably satisfied with its effectiveness, I would encourage you to also experiment with one of the newer pay-per-click search engines (after performing all necessary investigative research). You should be aware, however, that as of the date of this writing, each of the new pay-per-click search engines has substantially less traffic than the much more established GoTo.com.

That being said, if you are successful in increasing your site traffic, what's next? For one thing, you may want to assist visitors who elect to bookmark your site by creating a favicon; I created favicons for both my site and my client's investment site. In case this is new to you, a favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con as in Favorites Icon) is useful to visitors who bookmark your site while using a Windows PC and Internet Explorer 5.0 and above. For example, if you are using the configuration above and bookmark Yahoo!, you will observe a red "Y!" in your Favorites Menu (as opposed to the generic icon that IE displays if you bookmark a site that has not uploaded a favicon). In addition, should you revisit Yahoo! via the Favorites Menu, a red "Y!" will also appear to the left of the URL address one observes at the top of the page once the site has finishing loading. You can also download Yahoo's favicon. Once downloaded, Macintosh users like myself can view the favicon.ico by opening it with a program such as GraphicConverter, although I do not personally know of a Macintosh browser which supports the favicon.ico as of the date of this writing. Thus, uploading a favicon will help your site stand out (in the event that it is bookmarked by those using IE 5 for Windows - a quite popular browser).

Creating and subsequently uploading a favicon.ico file has been discussed previously in InternetDay and by other on-line resources. Still, some clarification is probably in order. Recommended guidelines for creating/uploading a favicon.ico file have been posted on-line by Microsoft. Ideally, the favicon should be 16 pixels x 16 pixels, using only 16 colors. It should be uploaded as "binary". Normally, it is uploaded to the root directory, so its URL has the format:

http://www.yourcompany.com/favicon.ico

Should you have important pages outside your root directory which may be bookmarked by visitors using IE 5 for Windows, you can select one of two choices:

(1) Upload the favicon.ico file to all relevant directories, not just the root directory. That is precisely what I did for my client's hedge fund site, since his affiliate program page does not reside in his root directory.
(2) Alternatively, insert the following code on an important page which, while important, still happens to reside outside the root directory. The HTML needed (but only for this particular situation) would have the format:

<HEAD>
<LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON" HREF="http://www.yourcompany.com/favicon.ico">
<TITLE>Your Page's Title</TITLE>
</HEAD>

Do not feel uneasy if all this seems a little daunting; it's not really all that complicated! If you would like to create a favicon quickly and easily, one possible method (although not the only one) would be to proceed to Favicon.com. Once there, assuming you have a fairly recent, Java enabled browser, you can use their Favicon Icon Generator to create a favicon for your site. Then, after it is instantly e-mailed to you, just upload the favicon.ico file (be sure to name it favicon.ico) using FTP software to your root directory as "binary" and you should be in business!

Article by Frank Feldmann, owner of Kaleidoscope DTS. Frank's award winning Free Search Engines Secrets page contains humorous yet highly practical advice on improving your Web site's position in the search engines. If you bookmark that page with IE 5 for Windows, you will see Kaleidoscope's favicon in your Favorites List.

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