Bid for Placement Search Engines have become extremely popular. The most popular is Overture (formerly goto.com). With these, you don't actually pay to submit. Instead, you create an account and bid against other webmasters for a position in their index on specific keywords. In other words, instead of getting a higher position by the relevancy of your web pages to a keyword search, you get placed higher as long as you make a higher bid on the keyword than someone else. To be number 1 on a keyword search, you only need to be the highest bidder. The second highest bidder gets number 2, and so on. Each time someone does a keyword search that you are bidding on, and clicks on your link, you get charged the amount of your bid.
Like the other search engines, some of the paid placement engines have agreements with other engines. So, being number one on a paid placement engine may make you number one on a completely unrelated engine as well. But remember, the moment someone outbids you, your position falls.
Our Good Keywords Reporting software interrogates the Overture bid for placement search engine to show how many searches were conducted on a phrase in the past month.
Overture is a pay-for-placement search engine, which allows you to select what position you would like your page to appear at with a given search term (keyword/phrase). You bid against other websites that wish to appear on the same search results, and the highest positions go to the highest bidder.
Overture's search results also appear on the following search engines:*
AOL
AltaVista
Lycos
Netscape
InfoSpace
Yahoo
Typically, search results on these other engines have an section at the top of their search result pages, called 'Featured Listings', or something of the sort. These listings typically show the top 3 bids on the search term used from the Overture database.
*Engines represent Overture's advertised search partners as of 01/02. Check Overture's website for the most up-to-date information.