So, if your an SMB company what are your alternatives to working with LookSmart? We would recommend your assessing Google's new "AdWords Select" program which is geared more for business of all sizes; but, I must warn you there is some complexity in setting up this type of program as well. But, you certainly get much more coverage with Google - their rapidly becoming dominant search engine du jour with approximately 40% market share of all combined searches.

Inktomi's "Search Submit" program should also be assessed as an alternative to working with LookSmart and as an adjunct to an existing Search Engine or Marketing program. They have partnered with some of same companies that LookSmart is working with, including MSN, AOL, iWon, and many others. They offer very good value for incurred costs, charging a nominal fee $39. for first URL and $25. for additional URLs to have your web site "crawled" (assessed or indexed) on a regular basis for one year and sharing this information with most heavily used search engines on web.

Finally, you may want to consider utilizing standard pay per click ("PPC") search engines to drive qualified traffic to your web site and/or looking at competitive PPC programs offered by LookSmart's competitors including Yahoo, AOL, Alta Vista and others. Overture (formerly GoTo) is dominant market leader in pure PPC market that can deliver a great deal of traffic. But, there are approximately 150 second tier pay per click search engines available for assessment and you should be able to leverage your marketing costs by carefully analyzing your "keyword buys" via some of these PPC search engines including Kanoodle, FindWhat, Sprinks and many others.

1. Pick twenty popular search terms.

2. Enter them at selected search engine.

3. Review first twenty results for each search and write down answer. Write a 1 if answer to your question is true for that listing and a 0 if it is false.

4. If answers are all same (either true or false), you may need to use more than twenty results for your study. If so, be consistent with all search terms.

5. If answers for second half of your results for all search terms is zero, you may need to include some more search terms until you have a non-zero result in second half of your results.

6. Total answers for all search terms for first half of your results. Separately total answers for all of your search terms for second half of your results.

7. Divide total from first half of your results by total of second half of your results.

8. If your answer is very close to number 1, then you will need to expand your search to more than twenty popular search terms... or review more than top 20 results... or possibly accept that answer to your question is that this particular factor is not very important to this search engine either way (positive or negative).

9. If your answer is significantly more than 1, then answer to your question is true.

10. If your answer is significantly less than 1, then answer to your question is false.

If your question is regarding formation of title, description, domain name or URL, this method is all you need. If your question regards something about underlying sites (ie: keyword density, use of header tags, hidden text, etc), then you may have to visit each site listed in order to answer your question.

I find it easier to turn each question into a true/false question, but you can also use this method with questions that have a numerical answer.

Now real challenge is finding questions, not answers. Recently a popular search engine started ranking sites with dead links lower than sites that quickly removed their dead links. This became obvious when above study was performed. The challenge was to come up with question: Do dead links on your site hurt search engine ranking?

Feel free to drop me a note at JamesBrausch@TargetBlaster.com with any interesting finds using this method. Happy hunting!