Microsoft officially launched their new MSN Search today, as anticipated. Bill Gates makes the announcement on the MSN home page with a prominently positioned “Letter from Bill Gates,” complete with photo. (although I prefer these photos of him).

This is good news for marketers. Microsoft’s new search technology offers a new channel for reaching your potential customers. Taking advantage of this new channel isn’t hard, either. The tried-and-true search engine optimization tactics work as well if not better on the new MSN Search as they do on Google and Yahoo. These tactics include keyword-rich title tags, keyword-rich body copy, links from ‘important’ sites and keyword-rich text in the links from those sites.

In my just-published article on MarketingProfs, I reveal some critical factors for success in the new MSN Search, including:

• the power of the anchor text of inbound links (“MSN bombing”)
• MSNbot’s level of tolerance for complex URLs (i.e. how many parameters in the “query string” are too many)
• how to obtain a list of backlinks for your site
• …and more

You’ll need to be a MarketingProfs premium subscriber to read the article. A version of this article is coming out in this month’s issue of Catalog Age magazine. It’s not online yet on Catalog Age’s site, but I’ll post a blog entry once it is.