Microsoft has finally made its Live Search Webmaster Tools available to all site owners, webmasters and SEO professionals. After a brief private beta, the Live Search Webmaster Center aims to help website professionals improve their results in the MSN and Live.com Search Engines.

The launch by Microsoft has been long overdue, with rivals Google and Yahoo! offering more comprehensive webmaster services for months (if not years). Given the delay, Live Search Webmaster Center is relatively underwhelming, offering significantly less functionality than its competitors.

The delay aside, the webmaster center will be a valuable resource for site owners looking to do some basic improvements to their results in MSN and Live search.

Some of the key features included are:

• Date your site was last crawled (or if it’s blocked)
• Details of how many pages are indexed in the Live Search index
• A Live Search Rank for your web pages – 5 point scale (different results to Google’s)
• Inbound and Outbound Link Tools
• A basic keyword analysis tool to determine potential rankings

While the Live Search Webmaster Center provides some helpful information for site owners experiencing organic search issues, for the rest – it lacks a lot of the detail provided by its Google and Yahoo! counterparts.

Apparently Microsoft is currently working on version 2.0, so hopefully more functionality is just around the corner.

To explore the new Live Search Webmaster Portal for yourself, sign in using your Windows Live login details. Then verify your site by uploading an XML file or inserting some special Meta data – and you’re on your way.

If you’ve already signed up and taken it for a spin – tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.

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