OK I thought I should circle the wagons on the webmaster tools, and show you something that will compensate for the short comings of all search engines webmaster tools, the software is called SEOAdministrator.

This has some very good tools. Best of all it will easily run ranking reports for your site, stores the reports and shows you updates each and every time you run it. This lets you watch your search engine rankings rise and (hopefully not) fall, it also shows you how many places each way. It works with nearly all major search engines and as long as your searches do not get too extensive, it runs smoothly without the use of proxies etc. It offers the ability to export reports, and an unlimited amount of URL’s and search terms.

The software does have lots of other functions/services like: link analysis, site index tools, link exchange tools, among other things.

I use this exclusively, I have tried most other software packages out there, and this seems to be the most reliable of them all.

Does anyone know if Microsoft’s search is called MSN or Live? I have no idea. They seem to be separate mostly, but there is no MSN webmaster tools, only LIve Webmaster Tools.

Live Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s first shot at giving webmasters some information about their site, and it is weak. It does give you the ability to submit a sitemap, and validate your website (by adding an XL file or meta tag to your site). Once validated, Live does show you little pieces of good information (more than Yahoo). Related to how Live views your website, it will let you type in a search term, which then displays which pages from your site are displayed in Live search.  They have this weird scale 1-5 (little green dots) where it shows you how important your page is for a particular search query, which gives you a clue, but with a rank of 5 (your page being viewed as important to Live) you may only be in the top 25 search results. I am not sure why they can not just tell you exactly where you’re ranked? Anyway, they seem to have gotten married to teasing us, with this 1-5 rank, which is somewhat useless in the big picture, when you can simply search Live and find where your site is ranked anyway (who knows).

Unfortunately Live has maintained this dumb little 1-5 green bar thingy for all of their information. They have a domain rank, they will show you the most important external links on a scale of 1-5, your most important internal links on a scale of 1-5 , how many pages from your site are indexed and when the last time the Live spider indexed your pages.  All great info, except for the 1-5 green bar…kill that someone!

Overall, Live has the right ideas, but they really need to dump this 1-5 grading dot chart and give us the nuts and bolts. Show me exactly where I rank for say my top 100 queries and show me all the links you see both external and internal. If Live makes these changes, they may be onto something.

Do yourself a favor: do not disregard Live/MSN. Yahoo is giving up market share and MSN/LIVE is getting it.