The three-step search (TSS) algorithm for block motion estimation has been widely used in real-time video coding due to the simplicity of the algorithm significant reduction of computationl cost and good performance. In this paper an improved three-step search (ITS) algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of the TSS algorithm. Simulation results show that in terms of motion compensation errors the proposed ITSS outperforms some popular fast search algorithms while it has the lower computational complexity.