If you have a personal or small business website chances are you are interested in increasing exposure and traffic to the site. Besides listing your site in major search engines there are several tools & resources that a webmaster can take advantage of to optimize the site.
Google (www.google.com), Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and Microsoft (www.live.com) are the big three when it comes to search engines. If you have a small business it is a must to get listed in all three sites. Beyond that you can check statistics, links & manage your sites in a variety of ways on each search engine.
Google has a comprehensive list of tools for webmasters at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. You can list & manage your sites (multiple & different sites if necessary) and take a look at links & other statistics. Yahoo offers a similar resources at: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. Like the Google site it allows you to manger your sites and get up-to-date statistics for your site. Both require accounts on the respective systems but are free services.
Microsoft does not offer the same dynamic services but has an excellent FAQ section that helps you manage & verify your site listing at: http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=wl_webmasters.
These extra steps are helpful to managing, verifying and optimizing your presence online.
Thanks for reading!