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Just a quick post to note these two links. First, Microsoft’s Live Search team announced the release of their Live Search Webmaster Center as a public beta this week. A quick review of the service shows promise, with valuable link and rank information shown for my site immediately after registering and verifying. I did have to switch to Safari, however, as I could not get my site registered in Firefox or see my site in Firefox after registration was completed in Safari. I thought it was a cookie issue, but after many retries I was not able to get Firefox to work, even after removing cookies, closing the browser, clearing the cache, etc. Once again, I believe it is important for any serious web site owner to be registered with any tools the search engines provide. This is the method for notifying search engines of new content (and sites) and getting reports of issues on your sites.

Also, the Yahoo! Search Blog has a nice summary of a SEO workshop talk, covering the topics of spiderability, duplicate content, linking strategies, fighting spam, and blended search, social marketing, behavioural search, and local issues. Many points a stress when talking to customers are reiterated here, including site structure, content is king, descriptive link text and the potential consequences of spamming the system among other, new and interesting points. A good read to reinforce tactics available to achieve your site strategy.

Initially launched in 2005, Yahoo!’s Site Explorer is becoming Yahoo!’s base for webmaster tools, equivalent to Google’s Webmaster Console tools. Currently, there is a limited set of tools available on Site Explorer, but expect Yahoo! to continuously add to the information and tools on Site Explorer.

Once you have created a Yahoo! account and signed on to Site Explorer, you can claim your sites to manage. This requires the upload of a file or adding a meta tag to you site. The tools available currently are Dynamic URL rewriting (in beta), sitemaps for Yahoo! Small Business store owners, and add site feeds for discovery and tracking.

The Yahoo! Site Explorer appears it will be a unique offering of tools for web site owners from Yahoo!. The different directions and techniques used by Google and Yahoo! in their consoles will make innovation move more quickly in this area, which is great for site owners.