According to research by Hitwise, as of December 2008, the top four search engines are (in order) Google (72.07%), Yahoo (17.79%), MSN (4.10%) and then Ask (3.15%). Each of these search engines provides a method for you to track how your site is doing in their results.

1. The first step is to make sure you have a robots.txt file and that it allows search engines to index your site.
2. The next step is to setup a sitemap, based on the sitemap protocol. This gives the major search engines a list of what pages you would like indexed and how you would like them to be indexed.

With those two steps complete the major search engines will be able to better find and index your content. To track how your site’s indexing is going for each engine, the steps are pretty much the same. Create a login, verify you own the site through either creating a file on your site or updating a meta tag, submitting a sitemap, and then tracking results:

• Google: Google.com by far the most popular search engine, provides Google Webmaster Tools. I like Google’s tools the best, as it not only provides statistics, but lets you view how individual pages, if there are any indexing errors, and allows you to diagnose your site. I think it provides the most information and I use it in combination with Google Analytics to track my traffic results.
• Yahoo: Yahoo.com provides Yahoo Site Explorer for its users to track their sites indexing. This tool provides a method to submit a sitemap and see your site indexing statistics but not much else. I still have an account registered to track how I am doing statistically.
• MSN: MSN.com provides Webmaster Tools to access indexing information. They provide a cross between Google and Yahoo tools as far as depth of information goes. While they have more information than just the statistics offered by Yahoo, it is not to par with Google’s offering.
• Ask: Ask.com does not provide a webmaster login but states that simply creating the appropriate robots.txt and sitemap files are all you need to do to help your listings. More information about Ask.com sitemap submission here.

Using these tools, why it will not increase your search ranking, will help you see how you are doing and diagnose areas of improvement. They are great tools to see how different SEO techniques are improving how your site is indexed.