Google has imposed itself as the "top-notch" search engine on the market, leaving little room for others. Little, but enough, some would say. Among the search engines, Microsoft's MSN comes third, after Google and Yahoo. So, how do you approach search engine optimization nowadays? Where should your site rank better?

Opinions vary. Everybody knows that it's rather hard to get Google to rank your site high in the search results. Most of the search engine optimization techniques used nowadays are meant to be relevant almost exclusively for Google. Every webmaster is concerned with code structure, sitemaps, keyword density, anchor texts, links and so on. Google is rather hard to please, especially when it comes to newly created sites.

The much-feared "sandbox" is a side-product of Google, where the new pages end up until Google considers them mature enough to be ranked in the search results. It's a drawback, and there's not much anybody can do about it, because one of the things that are valued by Google is the age of a web page.

Reports show that Google is already a saturated search engine. Its users see so many websites that they don't have the patience to spend much time on any given site, but still want to visit others as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it appears that MSN users are more likely to produce conversions (sales). This probability is 48% higher for MSN users than for any other Internet users.

MSN Optimization? How? 

MSN is dedicated to satisfying the visitors. Therefore, MSN wants to make sure that they can offer web surfers a high probability of finding what they want on your site. A well-developed site, with many pages and homogenous content will rank much better than a smaller site with poorly organized content (supposing that these two sites apply the ranking factors in a similar manner).

Microsoft's search engine has a great response to an increased keyword density (as opposed to Google, which is quite quick at identifying and penalizing sites that, according to its algorithm, are clearly spamming - and sometimes it is not far from the truth). This orientation towards quantity rather than quality makes MSN more spam oriented. But the criteria for choosing the right keywords for your site remain, basically, the same.

MSN will give credit to the new content and to the inbound links quite quickly. You should not forget about clean code. It is a major factor for site indexing, and even MSN, which is not as demanding as Google, will rank poorly sites with badly written code. 

There can't be a "Yes" or "No" answer to the question above. Yet, there could be a "Why not?" MSN does what Google avoids, and likes what Google frowns upon or regards with suspicion. And then there's also Microsoft's potential marketing power that they can bring to the search engine business. So, the value of MSN should not be underestimated. Of course, it is a rather feeble match for Google now, but this situation can change dramatically overnight.