Because of the rules governing intellectual property protection, each of these search engines are ruled by specific algorithms and procedures that they follow in arriving at each page's ranking among search results. However, despite this, you would probably see that there are sites holding the same ranks in each of the big three.

While the task of search engine optimization for each of these three engines could be daunting, it is not impossible because some sites have managed to gain high ranking in all three.

As an SEO specialist, you should be able to have at least some knowledge of how each of these three engines work. Having this knowledge will help you in planning how to optimize your site's content in an effort to rank highly in these search engines.

MSN

When you are optimizing a page for the MSN search engine, you should place importance in weaving a theme around your site, and build up a number of relevant backlinks or those links that point to your site from an external source.

Of the three, MSN is the easiest for SEO specialists to optimize for. This is because it easily sees newly posted content and inbound links, so even if your site is new it still stands a chance for high ranking if the theme requirement is met and has a solid number of inbound links. At this time, MSN does not weigh links value through age and history like the other two engines do, so it is relatively easier to gain a higher ranking in MSN.

Some people would probably not bother around in concentrating SEO efforts for MSN since it is the less used engine among all three, but data show that MSN users participate in e-commerce transactions more than the users of the other two engines. Thus, if you are engaged in Internet marketing, you should keep in mind to structure your site effectively for MSN.

Google

Google uses a strict algorithm to filter out sites for relevance to its users search queries and is the most difficult to optimize for. Unfortunately for many SEO specialists, Google also holds the spot for having the most people using it for searches. This means that webmasters (clients for search engine optimizers) are more likely to give you instructions to optimize them for Google.

With its latest update (nicknamed Jagger), Google has implemented an age delay criteria. This delay means that as time passes, inbound links to your site gain more and more weight. This is good news for those who have managed to stay around long in the World Wide Web and have built significant numbers of links. However, this could mean more difficulty in SEO efforts for newly established sites.

Like MSN, Google also places weight to a site's relevancy to a theme instead of just singular keywords. Sites that have more relevant internal pages than irrelevant ones are more likely to earn the top spot in Google's results.

Yahoo!

SEO efforts for Yahoo! until recently have been similar in nature to tactics used in structuring a page to gain a high rank in MSN. In short, if you can optimize your page for MSN, you won't have to do anything much for Yahoo!

However, Yahoo has recently adopted an algorithm that is similar to Google including the age delay factor. Just like Google, SEOs could expect for some considerable delay before the inbound links that they have built for a site can gain some value in the calculation of ranking among Yahoo's search engine results.

Tips in Optimizing Pages for All Three Engines

Now that you have understood how each engine arrives at each search result's ranking, you can then plan your SEO tactics accordingly so that you could gain some rank for each of them.

As you could see, each of them place similar emphasis for website content. This means that you should first concentrate of building content that satisfies these engines theme density requirements. Your SEO efforts at this point should focus on building content that is built around a certain theme, and you should putting pages that deviate from it lest you want to lose some of your points for relevancy.

Link building for your website is still important, however, MSN treats links differently from the way Yahoo and Google does. With their age factor, it would take you some time before you could gain your desired ranks in those two engines.

However, MSN offers you an avenue to gain a top rank with your inbound links because it has no age delay criterion. As your links gain in age, they would naturally gain some weight with Yahoo and Google. Thus, you should first concentrate your efforts in ranking in MSN through inbound links and expect a similar result to follow after a while in Yahoo! and Google.