Looksmart Web Directory

What is Looksmart ?

Looksmart has been founded in 1995 and is based in San Francisco. It was a web directory just like yahoo which you had to pay for a listing, but in April 2002 they radically changed their methods of submissions process and became a PPC Advertisement program.

The fees to get listed into their web directories was from $149 to $249.

If you want to have a listing in looksmart and advertise your website you have to pay $0.15 each time a visitor click on your web site link from Looksmart SERPs or publishers ads, this is called Pay Per Click. Pay Per Click is pretty useful for big companies selling products but not for webmasters who own an informative website.

If they had to pay $0.15 each time a visitor click on their links, they would be broke by now. 100 clicks = $15 to pay? And you are not even sure the visitors you get are interested in your site, they may quit 2 seconds after a swift visit on your website.

Looksmart's search engine algorithm is based on the description, title and keywords you give when submitting to their web directory. Also the category you submit in is part of the algorithm. Actually this is pretty hard to guess where you will rank on Looksmart web directory, so try your best and sharp your keywords, title and description. You might get lucky.

Looksmart For Publishers:

You can suscribe to looksmart if you want to become a publisher and get revenue from it or if you are an advertiser and look for traffic. Publishers have different marketing options:

- Looksmart Search Engines (searchWISE). Looksmart's search engine on your website. People will type a search from your website and if they click on a sponsored listing you get money.

- Looksmart AdWise to generate revenues from your site. You get revenue once people click on looksmart's paid listing from your website within Ads. The listing is based on your web site content to make the ads relevant. AdWise is synonym to the famous Adsense.

- You can choose different banner Ads for Looksmart Adwise helping you customizing your website:

+ leader board 728 x 90
+ rectangle 300 x 250
+ wide sky scraper 160 x 600

Looksmart For Advertisers:

- You pay only when visitors click on your link; = $0.15 CPC.
- You can set the ceiling you are willing to pay, the amount bid will always be at or below the Max CPC. So don't worry, once they see you are broke, they will stop to rob you.

So now how do i add my web site in looksmart's web directory without advertising or publishing and if possible for Free?

For business web sites who wants to get inside looksmart without paying. Sorry but this is impossible.

But for the one that have an informational web site or non-commercial website and wants to add it into looksmart web directory the solution was Zeal.

But i am sorry, the Zeal directory shut down on the 28th March 2006. Here lays down the archives of Zeal web directory on Irka's Blog.