Referring to the cnet news, microsoft is struggling for better results due to their competitor google, they have already tried out with window live for ad-backed businesses but no success so far.
The revenue was expected to grow by as much as 11 percent, the company now sees full-year sales growth in its Internet services business of just 8 percent from 3 percent.

“Success continues to elude Microsoft in this market,” Technology Business Research analyst Allan Krans said in an e-mail interview. He said Microsoft is hardly alone, with other rivals also struggling to keep pace with Google.

“Given Google’s large head start in the market and its ongoing momentum, we think it will be very difficult for Microsoft to have a real impact in the online search market during 2007,” Krans said. “However, Microsoft continues to take a long-term approach to this market, and plans to keep the investment dollars flowing into its ad business.”

Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell added in response to an analyst’s question on the company’s earnings conference call “On the search side you are correct we lost market share,”. He said he is “clearly not happy with that.”

I think this is high time for microsoft, they need to redefine their business strategy and leverage best practices to prove and improve to meet their overall financial goal and prepare to face the challenge with their prime rival Google.

Backlinks play a major role in increasing the traffic to a web hosting site. As part of a search engine optimization strategy you should aim to build backlinks up over time. Backlinks not only increase the number of visitors but also helps in gaining a strong position in search engine result pages for your chosen keywords.

These are some ways to buid backlinks

Directory Submissions
Article Submission
Press Release
Forum sigs
Blogging
RSS & Feeds

If you do all of the above you will slowly build up a huge network of backlinks. Take part in the conversation and build a good reputation at the same time as you build backlinks.

In recent years the most important step for a Web Site owner to ensure large number of hits for his website is to design his it in such a way that it is listed in search engine results on the top. This is a fast growing business now days.

(SEO) Search Engine Optimization uses a combination of techniques, tools, and technical know-how to get results. SEO is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a Web Site in search engine listing. SEO involves the careful designing of corporate Web Site to increase their chances of visibility in the major search engines for e.g. Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista etc. The higher a ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user.

• Meta Tags

Meta Tags are very important for your Web Site’s visibility. Many search engines read them from your site when you submit it to them .Major Meta tags that you can use:

Meta Title the only resource type that is currently in use is “documenting” This is the only tag that you need to put in for indexing purposes.

Meta Description Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. “Content” could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point.

Meta Keywords Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, separated by commas.

Navigational links:

At the right or at the bottom but not on the left of the page. When the search engines “read” your site, they read from the top left to the bottom right. Search engines place an emphasis on the first 100 words or text on the site. You do not want these words to be navigational links or JavaScript. Ideally, you want to have your heading tags with your keywords in the beginning of your page. This being said, placing your links/JavaScript on the right or bottom of your page ensures the search engine spiders get to the text first, giving more weight to what’s important on your page.

Rich Content:

Keep your site very content rich. The more content you have on your site the more likely someone is to find what they’re looking. Have a lot of pages. Update the site as many times as possible in a day if you have the time. Updating your site does not mean that you copy paste content from other web hosting sites. That will only push your rankings further down. Don’t have any duplicate content. At the same time, dont spam multiple content across the same website. A search engine constantly views or reviews a website or at least every few months, it looks for specific characteristics found in the content of website pages.
On More tips on Search Engine Optimization please visit.
http://www.googleseostar.org