Overture is Yahoo!’s answer to Google’s Adwords. Both allow you to target customers through keywords and even geography. Since Yahoo! purchased Overture in 2003, the programs have become increasingly similar. With Overture you can select the keywords you want to use and bid on them. Rankings are determined by the amount you bid.

You decide how much you want to spend with Yahoo! Search Marketing (what Overture is called now) and money is deducted from your advertising budget.

Google’s AdSense program has a wider reach than Yahoo! Search Marketing so for the same amount of money, you’ll get more traffic and more hits. Yahoo!’s partners (at press time) include CNN, InfoSpace, MSN and AltaVista. Not exactly major players in the search field, except for MSN, of course. Google’s program has been widely adopted by many major search engines and sites.

The good news is that the cost of keywords on Yahoo! are probably more reasonable, since there’s a little less competition. So you can experiment with keywords for less cost. The minimum starting account is just $5 at Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Down the road, as your budget grows for marketing and advertising, you may want to have a presence on both pay per click programs. There is not a lot of crossover between them as Google and Yahoo! visitors are pretty loyal to the site’s they’re used to.