IIS Gets an SEO Toolkit, Free on the Microsoft Web Platform

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Jun 4, 2009

Search Engine Optimization is a key element of any website design these days. Now you can hire an agency to help you improve your website's SEO or, you can do it yourself with a new toolkit for IIS: The IIS SEO Toolkit.

Tools For SEO Friendly Websites

The IIS SEO Toolkit is free via the Microsoft Web Platform. Still in Beta, it has a number of tools that should help you deliver websites that are more search engine friendly, which hopefully means higher traffic from the right people to the right content.

According to Lauren Cooney, GPM; Web Platform and Standards, Developer Division, Microsoft, "SEO should not be hard. It’s not meant to be rocket science – but frankly, it’s more difficult than we think."

This SEO toolkit is designed to analyze your website and provide recommendations for improvements. It also includes tools to easily create your sitemaps and robot files.

IIS SEO Toolkit

Three Tools in the Toolkit

There are three tools in the toolkit:

Site Analysis: Analyze all the resources and URLs that are exposed to the public using a crawl engine named ‘iisbot’. Get detailed information on all URLs, violations and suggested corrections. You can even perform word and route analysis on web pages and create custom queries on cached content. There is also a Report Summary dashboard that contains a number of prebuilt reports.
Robots Exclusion: Easily create a robots.txt file that indicates how search engine spiders should crawl your website. There's a GUI interface that provides both a physical and a logical view where you can allow and disallow paths.
Sitemap and Sitemap Index: Create your sitemap and sitemap index files easily. View them in a simple interface that enables to you add/remove URLs using either a physical or logical view of your website.

IIS SEO Toolkit

If you want a lot more information on how the SiteAnalysis Tool works, see Scott Gu's post demonstrating the tool on one his websites. In addition, there are a number of articles that walk you through how to use the toolkit and understand the reports.

The toolkit is designed for IIS7 and can be used for any website, even non-Microsoft websites. Head over to the Microsoft Platform Installer now and download your copy.