skibum - 1:00 am on Apr 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

I too would like to hear about MSN/Looksmart optimization. Having my keyword in the Looksmart title and more than once in the description seems to not have helped my ranking for that keyword at all.

It all depends on the LookSmart listing and then MSN applies a different algo to it. From what I've seen, there are some keywords that seem to be "reserved" so that no matter how many keywords are in your listing, there are other listings that get some kind of preference.

The term "keyword" is one of those. You can have "keyword" as the first word in the title and a few times in the description and be outranked by 50 listings that make no mention of the term "keyword" in the title or desctiption.

There are other terms where the desired keyword must be in the title of the listing in order for it to be returned for the given keyword. These may only be trademarked terms but they do exist to some extent.

I don't know how widespread either situation is, however, I've noticed these things when getting Zeal listings and not getting the MSN ranks that were expected. I suspect they are the same for the paid listings but haven't done any testing there.