Over the last three decades, there have been many studies in the area of missile guidance and control. The result has been a great deal of progress and several approaches to the problem have emerged. The basic problem is to intercept a target with great accuracy in an environment that is uncertain and noisy. One of the earliest forms of missile guidance is that of pure pursuit, command to line of sight and the proportional navigation, this involves establishing a line of sight (LOS) between the tracking sensor and the target. This work investigates the guidance and control design problem for a generic surface to air missile intercepting a given target using different optimized guidance laws which are the: optimized pure pursuit, optimized commend to line of sight, intelligent proportional navigation, and optimized proportional derivative based guidance. The performances of these guidance laws are tested against a given target in terms of the achieved miss distance and the time of closest approach. Furthermore, qualitative comparative study between the aforementioned guidance laws is presented.