Most website owners may just be focused on having their sites optimized on either Google or Yahoo, or, both.  Little do they know that there are actually three major search engines being used today. MSN Search seems to be a forgotten entity for some website owners. The reason for this may lie on the late entrance of MSN in the search engine battle for supremacy.

MSN got into the search engine picture only fairly recently. MSN Search only got introduced with its own search index in 2005. Previously it depended on Inktomi to provide search results for its service. As a late entry in the search engine field, it has greatly affected the popularity of MSN's search engine service, getting only about 10 to 15 percent of all the searches made online. But this should not be reason enough to disregard MSN Search altogether as a search engine worth optimizing your website for.

Search algorithms

MSN may also have its own loyal users. This might be good reason to have it included in your objectives to improve search engine rankings. Generally, the three major search engines today may have similar ways of ranking websites although they may use different search algorithms. As far as the web owner is concerned, he needs only to know the general search engine optimizing guidelines of the major search engines and strike up a balance or some sort of middle ground to accommodate the three search engines in ranking a certain website.

In the case of optimizing for MSN Search, website owners should bear in mind that MSN's search engine may not yet be as sophisticated as that of Google or Yahoo!. That is why when optimizing for MSN Search may prove to be an easier task than trying to optimize for the other two major search engines. One thing that website owners should think about when optimizing for MSN is the use of keywords.

Keywords

MSN Search still depends a lot on keywords for their search results. By this, on page keywords are what MSN Search focuses on mainly to for much of their search rankings. They still have to develop making off page factors such as back links as part of their search ranking criteria.

At this time, optimizing webpages for MSN ranking can still be fairly easy. Keyword density and putting keywords on file names can do a lot in improving a site's ranking on MSN. But also be aware that doing so, you might also be running the risk of getting banned on Google for keyword stuffing. Just make sure that you strike up an acceptable balance so that you optimize your site for all the three major search engines. 

Metatags

Metatags are also very important in ranking for MSN Search. It is still considered as a primary factor on MSN for ranking sites. Make your metatags meaningful enough so that it will help you do well on MSN. It might not negatively affect your search rankings on Google or Yahoo! in any way as long as you abide by the guidelines. So it would be best to have metatags on every page and you can greatly improve your rankings on MSN.