MSN now allows you to bid on a spotlight section, to the left of their regular search results. Your text ad can appear in this left hand box for any keywords you bid on and successfully win at their auction site. This is a way to auction off an advertising spot to the highest bidder and is nothing like the pay-per-placement method that Goto.com uses for its main content. I'd recommend bidding up to whatever price you believe would still allow you to be profitable.

More interesting than the ability to bid on an advertising spot, is the keyword service. Although this is not as handy as the service at Goto.com that will list many phrases for a given keyword at one time, it does show the approximate number of searches that were done at MSN for the previous month. It does this for one keyword or phrase at a time. This can help confirm that a chosen keyword is worth targeting. The MSN service can also give you an idea of how much traffic MSN receives in relation to Goto.com.

As I've stated in the past, achieving top 10 rankings are worthless if you target a keyword that nobody is searching for. Make sure you do your homework before spending the time to gain that top ranking!

The free MSN keyword service is located at the bottom of the page at:

http://keywords.bcentral.com

                 ← What is this?