Interview with Pierre Zarokian of Submit Express

CPU Review sat down with Mr. Pierre Zarokian, president of Submit Express (www.submitexpress.com) – one of the premier search engine optimization firms in the world to get some insight into how they have become so successful in top search engine rankings.

The Company

Submit Express (www.submitexpress.com) was founded in 1998 to provide search engine optimization for medium-sized and larger businesses that need to achieve top rankings within the search results at the major search engines. Submit Express specializes in the optimization of websites in competitive markets.

CPU Review: What tools and services do you offer to webmasters?

Pierre Zarokian: Our main service is search engine optimization. We also offer free search engine submission and submission to 75,000 plus search engines, which includes free for all sites and directories. Also on the website we offer several free tools for webmasters. These include tools for generating and checking META Tags, link popularity checkers, and html code analyzers.

We also have a free newsletter that is published every other month. The newsletter covers the latest news on search engines and search engine optimization.

CPU Review: You mentioned a number of your free services, what are the paid services that you offer?

Pierre Zarokian: Our 75,000 submission service starts at $24.95 and there are discounts for multiple web sites. We are a reseller for Inktomi, AltaVista and Lycos paid inclusion program, which guarantees listings in these engines within 48 hours and reindexes your website every 48 hours thereafter. Normally these submissions start at around $39 for first URL and $25 each additional URL.

Our main service is search engine optimization. As your readers may be aware, this is where we take a web site and generate a list of targeted keywords, which we will use to generate high rankings at the major search engines. Our optimization service also includes the paid inclusion services at Inktomi, Yahoo! and LookSmart.

Additionally, because of the importance of link popularity – we manually create multiple links to our client sites. This is a time consuming process, because the links would also have to be created from sites with similar topics and sites that are popular themselves.
Pricing is determined by the size and scope of the client web site and also by the competitiveness of the keywords.

CPU Review: How does a webmaster determine which of your services will be right for them?

Pierre Zarokian: When our clients contact us we evaluate their web site, their keywords and determine a monthly fee based on their needs. We also offer a performance based guarantee which works like this: the client is only charged based on the number of top 10 or top 20 listings which we are able to achieve. For example, we may charge $50 for each keyword achieving a top 10 listing, and $25 for each keyword in the top 20. We also then set a cap – which is the maximum amount that a client will pay regardless of the number of top listings.

CPU Review: What do you feel is the strongest aspect of Submit Express from the customer’s perspective?

Pierre Zarokian: Our experience and knowledge is probably our strongest asset. We’ve been professionally optimizing web sites for over 4 years – and we’re one of the largest companies in our industry. When we started there were only 10 or 12 companies in the search engine optimization space, now there are hundreds.

CPU Review: Who are your ideal customers?

Pierre Zarokian: Our ideal customers are mid sized to larger companies. Smaller companies usually don’t have the budget for our services. Usually B2B companies or ecommerce companies are the best fit – as they are generating significant income.

CPU Review: How do customers know that you are the right company for them? In general, how do companies figure out who the top search engine optimization companies are?

Pierre Zarokian: One thing I suggest is to simply check the top search engines and check for the search phrases ‘search engine placement’ and ‘search engine optimization’. Those companies whose listings come up on top know what they’re doing. Then I would recommend contacting the top 10 or 20 companies that are listed. You can then compare their prices and services – in other words get as much detail as you can. Guarantees are very important. We feel that our guarantee at Submit Express is the best in the business. In fact, if anyone else offers a better guarantee – we’ll beat it.

We’re also experts in link popularity service and highly recommend picking a company that offers this service.

CPU Review: What trends or new developments do you see emerging in the search engine optimization industry?

Pierre Zarokian: We’ve seen tremendous consolidation in the past. One major player is Google and the second major player is Yahoo! – which recently purchased Overture – who in turn had acquired the Alta Vista search engine and AlltheWeb.com (FAST). Currently there is a big monopoly, as Google powers both Yahoo and AOL results, which represents 70-80% of the search market. I anticipate that in the coming year we will begin to see less of a monopoly out there.

Yahoo! is going to change that soon by likely adopting Inktomi to power their search by the end of the year. Also Microsoft has announced a major initiative in the search engine space – it seems likely that they’ll develop into a major player.

As far as other changes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve premium optimization – it’s getting a lot tougher to get the best rankings. Competition is more intense, and many search engines are converting their top spots to pay per click models.

Editor’s Note: To learn more or to sign up for search engine optimization services please visit Submit Express at www.submitexpress.com.