Jan
4
Get Found Now has been Live Search Webmaster Center beta testers since it began. We have been using the system for a while and are ready to fill our readers in on how it works. Much like Google’s Webmaster Center, Live’s Portal gives you a lot of insight into your website, at least how it is perceived by Live. If you aren’t using it, you should be. You can access it here. You will need a Microsoft Passport or ID to set up your websites and access the portal.
While most people focus on Google optimization first, then Yahoo, Live is still accounting for around 10% of all searches on the Internet. Get Found Now has about the same placement for our primary keywords in all 4 of the major search engines (I include ASK as a major search engine), but my traffic is different than the percentages of searches that are tracked by places like Nielsen Net Ratings. If you follow those things, then you know that it is estimated that Google gets around 50% of all searches in the US. comScore released its ranking looking at August and September of 2007. They are saying that in the US Google has a 57%, Yahoo 23%, Live 10% and ASK at 4.5%. With ASK being the exception ALL major search engines saw a decline in activity.
Looking at the numbers above you would think that the traffic would have a similar pattern, but my traffic for keywords related to social network marketing, Web 2., online marketing, etc. are actually quite different. I get 70% of all my visitors from Google, with Live being next at 15%. ASK and Yahoo are about the same with around 5%. The rest of my traffic comes from other sites. Now this does not take into consideration RSS. People that visit my blog by clicking on a link within an RSS feed account for more traffic than anything except for pure Google searches. My blog actually has almost an equal amount of entries as does my home page. My point here is that you can’t ignore Live and that using their Webmaster Center is a good idea and worth your time.
Next week I am going to do an overview of Live’s Webmaster Center with a walk through of its features like my Google Webmaster Center Updates post.
If you are interested in the search engine rankings below is a snapshot of the ComScore’s QSearch Search Engine Share.
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Aug
25
Live Search Webmaster Portal In Beta
Filed Under Live Updates | 2 Comments
Well Microsoft Live Search is finally joining Yahoo and Google in giving webmasters access to information about their sites through a webmaster portal. Even though they are behind the times as usual, at least they are doing it. Get Found Now are beta testers of the portal and we will be passing along useful information to our readers as we use the new portal.
The public release of Live Search’s Webmaster Portal will be available to the public sometime in the fall. Since March Microsoft has been working on tools to help webmasters. I am sure you noticed that you couldn’t search for backlinks on Live anymore. This is the result of fixing the problems that link searches created. They will also be adding these tools:
- Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
- Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
- Statistics about your website
- Consolidation of content submission resources
- New content and community resources
This is a solid move on their part to increase the interactivity of their site. Even though Live is a distant third in the grand scheme of searches, their 8 or 9% market share still results in millions of searches per day. The bottom line is nobody is in a position to ignore any types of major traffic sources. We’ll be keeping an eye on this and will pass on to you what we have learned.