Lycos has announced the redesign and re-launch of their InSite
paid inclusion service. Since February 2002, Lycos has battled to
increase the popularity of its InSite service, struggling to compete
with established companies such as Position Technologies. In an effort
to take advantage of an estimated $1.7 billion industry, Lycos has
listened to feedback from search engine marketers and with this
re-launch, hopes to steal a significant share of the paid inclusion
market. I recently sat down with Adam Soroca, group product manager
for Lycos InSite and took a sneak peek at the revamped service.
The first thing you notice with the new service is the enhanced
look and feel of the website. The old InSite website suffered from too
many assumptions. Lycos assumed you knew about paid inclusions and how
to submit your website to the search engines. With the new design,
Lycos caters more to the beginner or inexperienced search engine
marketer, providing a simple explanation of the service being offered.
For example, instead of labeling one service “Paid Inclusion” they
have changed the name to “Search Engine Submission”. A subtle
change, but one that instantly makes it easier for the inexperienced
marketer to understand the type of service being offered.
Lycos wanted to move away from industry terminology such as “paid
inclusion” and be more descriptive with their wording, hence using
“search engine submission”, explained Adam Soroca.
The new interface also introduces several enhanced tutorial areas
including an Introduction to Search Engine Marketing section
and a How Search Works area. Both of these sections offer
information on how search engines work and what benefit search engine
marketing brings to a business. Everything is covered here, including
layman’s terminology to describe how search engine spiders gather
information from the Internet. Tom Wilde, global manager of search
services for Terra Lycos explains, “Our goal with the new Lycos
InSite interface is to educate advertisers and site owners on how paid
inclusion works”.
In addition to making the site easier to understand, Lycos has
updated the actual submission interface to make it more “user
friendly”. Their URL Suggestion Tool allows anyone to quickly
determine which URLs of their website should be submitted. Don’t
know the names of the pages within your site or need some suggestions
on which ones to submit? With InSite, you can spider your website and
see a list of suggested URLs to submit using paid inclusion. While
this is currently limited to spidering 50 URLs and does not group
pages by folder, Adam tells me these will be added enhancements in the
next version due in around 45 days.
The newly redesigned InSite service also includes:
• Easy site submission to FAST and Inktomi paid inclusion
• Distribution on top search engines like Lycos, HotBot, MSN and
LookSmart
• Rapid inclusion and frequent refresh of content
• Detailed click, keyword and site optimization reports
• Cost calculators that estimate the paid inclusion costs
• Discounts for multiple submissions
While the Lycos InSite service utilizes the back-end technology of
Position Technologies, the company hopes that the added extras,
multiple submission discounts and a search engine tutorial will be
more than enough to bring search engine marketers, of all levels and
experience, flocking to use the InSite service.
Andy Beal is Vice President of Search Marketing
for KeywordRanking.com
and ProRanking.com,
global leaders in professional search engine marketing. Highly respected as a
source of search engine marketing advice, Andy has had articles published
around the world and is a repeat speaker at Danny Sullivan's Search Engine
Strategies conferences. Clients include Alaska Air, Peopleclick, Jos. A. Bank
and NBC. You can reach Andy at andy@proranking.com
and view his daily SEO blog at http://searchlowdown.blogspot.com.