While Google has indeed become synonymous with Internet search, web developers cannot afford to ignore alternative search engines. By bridging websites with users, search engines are an important source of traffic, but not until domains are indexed and ranked. Indexation is an automated process that will generally involve only submitting a website to a search engine. Growing to the highest possible ranking, i.e. making the website the first result returned to a user search is a tad more complicated and it involves Search Engine Optimization. Microsoft currently occupies only the third position with Live Search on the search engine market behind Google and Yahoo. And in this context, Live Search should be at the top priority list of all search engine optimization practices, alongside Google and Yahoo.

"If your site is not performing in Live Search or you are not being indexed by Live Search there are some steps you can take to change course and improve your rank. First and foremost at Live Search ranking is free and you can't pay to boost your website's relevance ranking. We have a completely automated ranking process which takes into account a lot of different factors. These factors include web page content, the number and quality of websites that link to your pages, and the relevance of your website's content to query terms," revealed Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager Live Search Webmaster Team.

Andrick explained that one of the most relevant item when optimizing a website for a search engine is the content. Unique materials, the right language, keywords, and HTML tags all will be read by search engine crawlers. In terms of ranking, "being connected" is everything. The more websites link to a specific domain, the more that domain will gain importance and climb in the rankings. Great content however is strictly dependent on who can read it.

Users will have no problems navigating a website, automated robots will, if there is heavy usage of Adobe Flash, AJAX, Images or Silverlight, or any Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies for that matter. JavaScript navigation, HTML frames and misconfigured Robots.txt files will also contribute to keeping a website invisible. And in the end, manually submitting a sitemap ensures that a website is indexed.

"The last question you'll need to ask yourself is if you might have been using any "aggressive" marketing tactics (aka Spamming). The best way to check is to log into the Webmaster Tools, verify your site, and check your dashboard to see if we're blocking any pages in your website. If so, after you have addressed the issue, you can use the form to request reinclusion into the Live Search index," Andrick added.