Overture marketing has long been recognized as an incredible method for driving traffic to websites from the major search engines.

Overture was a pay-per-click marketing service that actually was a search engine originally established in the late 1990s under the name GoTo.

A strategy change in early 2000 positioned Overture as a powerful pay-per-click service as the company made deals with most of the major search engines (Google excluded) which would allow their advertisers to have their cost-per-click advertisements displayed in the major search engines.

This move made Overture marketing highly desirable for website operators as a means of driving traffic to their websites from the major search engines.

In 2003, Yahoo! began making plans to acquire Overture and within a couple of years they dropped the Overture brand re-branding initial Overture products as Yahoo! Search Marketing Products.

So, in effect Overture is no longer in existence as it has been replaced by Yahoo! Search Marketing. Even so, the power of what was once known as Overture marketing is still alive and well but it is now offered through the Yahoo! Search Marketing services.

Google, the most widely used major search engine, did not go for Overture marketing advertisers having their ads displayed in its search results.

Rather, Google launched its very own cost-per-click advertising program which is called AdWords. There is a lot of competition between Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google, of course, since they are the two main providers of pay-per-click advertising services.

Some of the smaller search engines are actually powered by Google, meaning their search results come from Google.

Many of the smaller search engines receive pay-per-click advertising results from Yahoo! Search Marketing, so advertising through the Google AdWords program and Yahoo!

Search Marketing pay-per-click programs provides the potential for your advertisements to displayed in all of the major and some of the smaller search engines.

Rumor have been stirring that Microsoft is considering starting its very own pay-per-click advertising program, perhaps through the MSN search engine that it owns.

In early 2005, representatives from Microsoft confirmed the rumors that the company was looking at getting into the pay-per- click advertising game.

For website owners, this could be a good thing as there will be three major mediums through which to purchase pay-per-click advertising, so the competition for keywords will likely diminish making it less expensive for website operators to achieve good search engine listings through cost-per-click advertising.

At the same time, there is potential that pay-per-click management could become a much bigger job for website operators to desire to be represented in all of the major search engines and thus end up managing search engine marketing campaigns through three different pay-per-click providers.

Overture marketing was once the preferred choice of pay-per-click advertisers. However, when Google launched its AdWords advertising program, it quickly became a popular and preferred method of advertising for many website owners.

The AdWords program is very powerful because when you advertise with Google, your advertisements appear on websites throughout the Google network in addition to appearing in the search engine results.

If Microsoft does in fact launch their pay-per-click program that they have been testing, it is expected to have similar potential for reaching vast targeted audiences due to the variety of MSN services that are in existence.

Yahoo! Search Marketing, formerly Overture, is still a power- packed pay-per-click advertising provider as well and will likely continue to produce excellent results for advertisers.

One thing is for certain. Using pay-per-click advertising services that are associated with major search engines is a productive method for driving traffic to your website.

There will likely be more players on the field in the near future. Which pay-per-click advertising provider will be most beneficial is hard to say, but chances are, all them will be highly effective for driving traffic and pay-per-click expenses are likely to decrease due to increased competition and more opportunities for pay-per-click advertisers.