Overture Search Engine
Overture submission and placement services

Overture Search Overview

Overture, a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo Inc., offers essential marketing services for companies doing business online. Overture pioneered sponsored search by aligning the interests of consumers, its more than 100,000 active, paying advertisers and its worldwide distribution partners, including Yahoo!, MSN, Wanadoo, InfoSpace, AltaVista, HPinvent, AllTheWeb and CNN.

Overture History

Formerly GoTo.com, Overture was founded in September 1997 by Bill Gross of Idealab, and in June of 98 the company launched its sponsored search service to enable advertisers to bid for search result placement on specific keywords relevant to their businesses.

One year later, the company completed the initial public offering of its common stock, which commenced trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market. On October 7, 2003 Yahoo! Inc. acquired Overture, which now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo!.

Overture Paid Inclusion Service

Unlike many of the other major search engines on the web, Overture sells its main listings to companies willing to pay to be placed higher in the search results on a bid for position basis. Although debatable, Overture feels this improves relevancy.

In April of 2003, Overture acquired AllTheWeb and AltaVista. Not long after, Overture was acquired by Yahoo!, which means Yahoo! now owns AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Overture and a host of other search related proverties such as Inktomi Corp. which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Yahoo and is the leading provider of OEM Web search and paid inclusion services.

Overture Paid Sponsor Listing

Overture gives Paid Sponsors listings to MSN, Yahoo!, AllTheWeb and AltaVista. It also receives secondary results from Inktomi, which is also owned by Yahoo!.

Secondary results come into play when a search query is made where there are no results from that particular engine. For example, if someone searched on Overture for horse rides, and overture had none of its own listings for horse rides, it would use the Inktomi listings for that particular query.

Advertisers bid each keyword phrase in order to determine positioning within the Overture search results. Bidding is on a pay per click basis (PPC). Below these paid listings is additional results provided by Inktomi.

Participation in Overture's PPC Search Listing

In order to appear in Overture search results you must first open an account and deposit money (credit card accepted). Once you have an account, you submit keyword phrases with title and descriptions and a URL. At that point, you can go back and monitor your position and bid on the specific keywords you’ve submitted in an attempt to achieve or maintain the position you wish.

If you wish to be listed below the paid listings, you can submit your site to Inktomi. At the current time, however, Inktomi is not accepting new listings due to the fact that they are currently trying to make changes to their site to transition their products and services over to their partner, Overture.

Listing Guidelines and other Basics... Information on How to Get Your Listings Approved, including details on content, titles and descriptions, direct path, site ownership and techniqueal guidelines.

Overture Signup...

Tutorials... Learn the basics of Overture search advertising, including selecting keywords, bidding on keywords and writing effective titles and descriptions.

Also learn about how Overture's Match Types, Best Practices, Tracking and Auto Bidding work, as well as Payment Plans and how to increase click-throughs and sales by creating more effective search listings.

Advertiser's Centre... The DirecTraffic Center® provides advertisers with a comprehensive account management system for multiple products.

Search Engine Spider Identification forum... have the spiders come crawling?

If you already have a good understanding of what seo is all about and intend on giving it a try for yourself, our Search Engine Submission and Placement Tutorials and SEO Central Articles of Related Interest can help.

If you are new to seo and want to learn more, we suggest you begin by having a look at our search engine positioning primers...

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Overture search engine
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