Get Listed at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search

To ensure you get listed nice and quick:

1. Ensure your site is complete. No half finished pages. Good use of title, description and heading <h1> tags. Ensure your keywords (the important phrases that people will be using to search for your site) are in your tags.

2. Ensure you have a robots.txt file with valid markup and a sitemap file. Although these are not essential, they can only help. Microsoft have a webmaster center with tolls to help you. Google have a similar facility. Here you can validate your robots.txt file, check when the robots last visited and see how many pages are indexed. Here is an example of a robots text file validated by Microsoft:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://yoursite.org.uk/sitemap.xml

3. Submit your site at Live Search Submit and Google Submit

4. Get some good quality links to your site

Recent problems with sites being dropped from Microsoft Live Search

At the end of September, quite a lot of sites (some people suggest almost 25%) disappeared entirely from the index. Forums have been alive with web masters and designers trying to solve the problem. If your site was dropped from the index, take the following action:

1. Check that your site does not include spam, dodgy SEO, duplicate pages, links from spam sites and link farms etc

2. Follow steps 1 to 4 above.

3. Wait and pray!

Microsoft admit there is a problem and it's their fault!
It seems that Microsoft only have a team of three people to deal with these issues. However some helpful news has come form them. It would seem that at the end of September, they applied a new algorithm which they now admit was too strict and penalized too many pages. They are now in the process of modifying the algos and say that things should be sorted out by the end of the spring.