Formerly known as Overture, the brand's paid search division became Yahoo! Search Marketing on March 1, 2005. Yahoo! Search now serves more than 100 million searches every day. Today, Yahoo! is a 27 per cent piece of the whole US search pie, and is considered to be the major Search Engine worldwide. The proportion places Yahoo! on the same level as Google and MSN. Search engine marketing was a $5.75 billion industry in 2005 and it will nearly double to $11.1 billion in 2010, according to SEMPO's (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) latest industry survey. Consequently, by doing marketing on Yahoo! Search, your business stands a good chance of succeeding.

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a pay-per-click product under Yahoo!'s management. If you use Yahoo's pay per click program, your site will appear at the top of the search results pages for Yahoo!, AltaVista and many more search sites. Yahoo! Search Marketing is primarily a manually-edited pay-per-click search provider. Here is how to advertise with it.

1. Write ads for your web site.

2. Submit them and have them approved by Yahoo! It is best to submit a landing page that is obviously and immediately relevant to the keyword.

3. Place bids for search terms you want. If you place the highest bid for a specific keyword or set of keywords, then you rank number one in these paid listings. Ensure you target your keywords properly and do not get in bidding wars. Bid on keywords that are less popular. Do not bid high prices for exceptionally broad or generic phrases, or make sure you use negative words to block terms you are not interested in.

4. The ads appear in the search results on Yahoo! Search Marketing partner websites. The service comes with a $5 deposit which is converted to click credit. There is no monthly minimum spend. You should take the time to set up your own account and complete the process yourself since you know your products better and are more interested in your own success than some service providers.

Yahoo! believes that a combination of human review and mathematics works better than just mathematics alone. Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions offers sponsored search and submit products, providing one-stop search marketing resource for businesses, which includes the following products:

- Sponsored Search Listings, the flagship search advertising product

- Content Match, Yahoo!'s contextual advertising listings

- Local Match, Yahoo!'s local sponsored search offering

- Site Match Self Serve and Site Match Xchange, Yahoo!'s search URL submission products

- Yahoo! Product Submit, the Yahoo! Shopping URL submission program

- Yahoo! Express, the Yahoo! Directory URL submission program

- Marketing Console, which enables advertisers to track campaign performance across multiple online channels

- Search Optimizer, which allows advertisers to improve their campaign performance and reduce the amount of time spent managing their listings

Benefits of Yahoo! Search Marketing

- You can set your own daily budget

- You only pay when your site receives traffic, which is very targeted traffic since you can pick the keywords you want your site to show up for

- Extensive reporting tools

- Great research tool that shows what keywords people are searching for

- Free conversion tracker to see how your traffic converts into sales