Direct Hits
website optimization and promotion specialists


Here are answers to some of your most frequently asked questions. Please be sure to contact us for clarification about these answers or with any other questions you may have about our service.


Service Details

Pricing/Payment


 
How much do you charge and what exactly does your service involve?

Our suggested service plans range from $995 to $2995 (US Dollars) per year, but custom packages and pricing are available to suit any requirements or budget. We also offer a quarterly payment option.

Please see the services page for more details about how we can help you.

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Which search engines will you submit my website to?

We will manually submit your website to every single one of the web's major search engines to ensure that your site is added perfectly where it will matter most. For the most part, re-submitting a site to search engines is neither necessary nor recommended, but we will under some circumstances re-submit your site, but only if and when it is beneficial to do so. Usually, however, once a website has been sucessfully visited and indexed by a search engine it will continue to be re-visited according the search engine's own schedule.

 
Some Notes About Yahoo

It is important for you to realize that the only reliable way to get a site added to Yahoo is to use their paid express submission service. We will develop and submit an optimized listing to Yahoo (along with all other human-compiled directories) for you, but you will need to allow us to use your credit card to make the submissions using their paid services.

Yahoo has since early 1999 offered their "Business Express" service which invites you to pay them $299 for the guarantee that they will consider your website for submission within 7 business days. While some people find it distasteful to be asked to pay to have their submission considered, it really has become the only way to get a new site added to Yahoo. And since so much web traffic originates from Yahoo, it is money well spent. Although Yahoo promises only to review your website for inclusion in their directory - they do not promise that your site will be added - it's been our experience that they will only refuse a website if it contravenes one of their guidelines. It's unlikely that your site will fall short of any of their requirements and, if it will, you'll be notified by your Direct Hits representative before a paid submission to either directory occurs.

We therefore strongly recommend that you authorize us to use your credit card to pay Yahoo for their express service.

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How long will it all take?

Here is the series of events that will happen starting from the time we receive payment...

Within 5 business days, we will develop and deliver via email the optimizations to your website.

Within 24 hours of the optimized code being successfully applied to your live website, either by you or by us, we will submit your website to search engines. We begin with the major search engines and directories, and then move on to the many thousands of minor search engines.

From the time your site has been submitted to search engines, it can be a very long time before it is recorded by most of them. Even the quickest still take at least a week or two, and the other search engines are nowhere near as speedy. But we won't be sitting around waiting. Starting at this point we will be expending the bulk of our effort on background promotional techniques (elaboration available only by telephone) which will continue during the entire time we are in your service.

From 2 to 16 weeks after submitting your site to search engines, as your site begins to appear on each of them, we will apply some additional promotional techniques that only work once your site has been listed. This work, like our other background activities, will continue for as long as we are in your service.

...and in the final month of our service agreement, we will invite you to renew our services.

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How will you supply the website optimizations?

The optimizations to your website will be emailed to you for easy cut and paste addition to the HTML source code of your website. Most often, we will send you a duplicate of your HTML source code so that you can see exactly where the enhancements are to be placed. In many cases, it is possible to simply replace your entire top-level page with the new source code that we provide. Be sure to backup your original just in case.

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Can you make the changes to my website for me?

Yes, but in order for us to do so it would be necessary to give us temporary access to the webserver where your website is hosted. Most of our clients prefer to apply the modifications themselves or have their webmaster do it for them.

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Do you use "doorway" or "gateway" pages?

Doorway pages are pages which are designed exclusively to appeal to search engines. They are usually crammed with huge and ugly keywords and keyphrases. Because doorway pages do nothing to make a good impression or impact on visitors to your site, and can even be penalized on some search engines, we try to avoid using them as much as possible. We can use doorway pages if you want us to, but so far, since starting in 1995, we have never had to resort to using doorway pages.

We strongly believe in preserving the appearance and functioning of your website in any way that we can, and doorway pages tend to do the exact opposite, to say nothing of the negative way that they are handled by most major search engines.

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What will you do for me if I choose to renew your services?

For an additional fee of only part of the listed service plan price, we will continue to provide you with consultancy, advice, reports and any further website enhancents that are necessary as well as apply every method we know to keep your site ranked as highly on search engines as it possibly can be. During that service period, you can expect us to be available to you and to proactively contact you with any tips or additional suggestions that are needed to maintain or further improve your site's position on search engines.

Please note however that you must opt for the ongoing service at or before the end of the initial service period, which begins when we supply the first website enhancements to you. This is because the longer a website's search position and widespread presence on the web is allowed to "decay", the more work there is for us to do when we're called back in.

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Can you improve the search results of any website?

Yes, however we may be limited in what we can do for certain websites.

Sites that are in an especially overpopulated category of the web (such as adult or web-related sites) can be very difficult indeed to get ranked highly on search engines. While we will still be able to offer tremendous improvement to the search results of even these sites, it is unlikely that we can promise to get them ranked at any specific level.

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What about dynamically generated websites?

No problem.

An increasing number of our projects are dynamically generated websites, and we have several proven and non-intrusive workarounds for this.

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Do you offer quantity discounts?

Yes, for multiple sites we offer 3% off per site to a maximum of 15% off the initial setup fee.

We also offer an alternate discount plan to our affiliates who wish to resell our services and have a large number of sites for us to work on.

Please contact us for an exact quote.

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What payment methods do you accept?

We accept payment by credit cards through a secure form.

We also accept payment by check, money order, or bank transfer.

Please send checks and money orders to...

MoonRabbit Web Design
7 West Lynn Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M4C 3V7
Canada

...we'll contact you when the check arrives and start work on your site right away. We will complete the optimizations to your website within 5 business days of receiving the check, without waiting for it to clear.

With the check, please enclose your email address and the web address/URL of the website so that we may call up any past correspondence.

Contact us for additional payment information.

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Copyright 1995-2008, Direct Hits, a division of MoonRabbit Web Design, 7 West Lynn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M4C 3V7, Canada, 1-647-346-5380info@direct-hits.net


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