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MSN’s share of the search engine market is about 17% and falling, though it is falling at a far slower pace than Yahoo! which may soon lose its second position to MSN. This alone might make MSN worth considering when it comes to search engine optimising your website but there is yet another, more important reason to take into account.

MSN has included Live Search as part of Windows Vista. The fact brought it into a direct clash with Google who are both interested in the desktop search market and worried by Microsoft’s ability to direct Windows users on the software they use to perform web searches right from the Start menu on their computers.

The anti-trust regulation results show that Microsoft and Google have come to an agreement regarding that, but that does not mean that Google has won and Microsoft has lost. Quite the contrary, given the inertia that governs a large percentage of computer users it is likely that MSN will see a resurgence on its popularity. Nothing sufficient to threaten Google but probably enough to overtake Yahoo! which is ailing at any rate.

This means that the moment Vista becomes widespread MSN search may enjoy a boost in popularity that will propel it to second place.

Succeeding in the organic search engine wars requires brains as well as brawn. While MSN may account for only a small segment of the search engine market terms there are less highly contested than in the over-populated, crowded Google database and you may well find that if you place high enough there you will end up getting a sizeable chunk of unexpected but very welcome traffic.

Check out our SEO Essentials section for how to get listed in MSN if you are not already listed there.