In what will make for interesting reading over the next few weeks, Microsoft’s Live Search Webmaster Center has begun a new blog series focusing on basic search engine marketing for small business owners and anyone else who has to manage a website but has little to no knowledge about SEM.

There’s going to be a new forum attached to the series, and subjects specifically called out include PPC and “over-zealous optimization techniques,” which might cover a lot or a little territory.

There’s a lot of this kind of stuff available on the Intertubes of course, so why is this interesting? It’s because Microsoft, out of everyone around, is the company with most at stake in the search-wars. They’re desperate to start winning against Google, but so far it’s hard to see them winning even one battle.

Building relationships with new webmasters is one way to make a start – a small one – but to do it right they’re going to have to walk a fine line between giving up good information about gaming search algorithms, and guarding their own algorithm secrets. It’s worth keeping one eye on this, just for fun.