opinions on looksmart express submit

[Keller]

Has anyone used looksmart's "express submit" ($299)? I'm not sure how big they are, but they also work with MSN. Is it worth the money, and are there any other good options for increasing traffic?

[Jeff]

I used it a few months back. It works, but I wasn't very pleased with the descriptiion they wrote - pretty bland and also devoid of any keywords which would get traffic. I don't think Looksmart amounted to a fraction of the traffic the site receives from Dmoz or Yahoo.

[Keller]

Thanks for your insight Jeff. Yahoo and Dmoz are covered, and I was looking to expand to more search engines. I noticed looksmart also has an option to change the description of your listing for $199(!), which seems somewhat unfair, especially if they gave you a bad description you didn't ask for.

[dmorton]

Have you found any alternatives that you do recommend or a reliable site that has compared engines? thanks.

Daniel

[Armand]

Urrggh... personally I have a vendetta against LookSmart. I don't know how put my site got added a long time ago and in the description they added a poet's name that utterly has no involvement with my site, which has on occasion caused quite a few problems. And despite contacting them a couple times they refuse to change it.

[Keller]

I tried Google's AdWords which cost $15 for 1,000 impressions. The click-rate was about 3%-4%, (about 38-50 cents per click). This is not too bad, but if you can get top ranking on google that's much better.

Overture (used to be goto.com) is also very good, especially if you don't have too much competition for the word you bid on.

Yahoo is usually worth the money, if your site is making a profit. I got listed for free

DMOZ is free, so you should get in their directory if your site is good.

The only way to get into altavista is if you pay them, $30 for the first URL and the rest are about $20. They are getting much less traffic lately.