MSN / Live certainly isn't dominating search but it still provides value to webmasters, especially in certain niches.

Prior to August 13, 2008 their webmaster tools only showed the top 5 backlinks for your site. Now the Webmaster Center has included up to 1000 of your backlinks, including their method of ranking these links called Page Score.

Page Score is displayed using 1-5 asterisks with 5 being the top quality score. The links can be downloaded in comma delimited format and includes the page title, url, page score, region, and language. Please add anchor text!

Your domain backlinks can be excluded from the results by selecting the filter option, entering your domain name, and changing the list box to exclude.

The same information is also available for your domain's outbound links. More information is available at Live Search Webmaster Blog.

Chapter 4 of the Website Building Series.

SEO web design is the process of creating a website that will provide a positive influence on organic rankings for targeted keywords. The website is still created with the visitor and conversions in mind. This means that we are creating something that will be useful, linkable, and still be a contributing factor in our SEM process.

If you need some help understanding the basics of web design take a look at our HTML tutorial.

This is the third article in our website building series designed to showcase ethical, safe, seo web design methods.
The first article discussed how to qualify your niche and the second discussed seo planning.

Before we build our website we should discuss some important factors that all websites built with professional website design methods should include.

Quality Hosting

By now you have established your niche, keywords, and have a good idea of the competition and keywords you plan to use to build traffic. If not, then go back to the website building article defining how to qualify your niche.

Prior to getting knee deep into website design we need to think about domain names, developing our site structure, and navigation, along with a few other preliminary decisions before initiating the site creation phase. Let's talk about them now.

Branding & Domain Names

To develop a successful website online it must at least meet this minimum criteria:

• There must be demand for the product / service / information.
• The level of competitiveness must be understood and accepted as reasonable and attainable
• You need to be able to monetize the site after successfully obtaining traffic.

The elite marketing types of the world can create a market. The rest of us need to identify and take advantage of one that already exists.

Identifying Demand

There are many products available for sourcing keywords and obtaining demand estimates for those keywords. Notice the word estimates. Always use multiple sources of information to get a feel for keyword demand.