Tools & Code: Microsoft’s SEO Optimization Toolkit (Scott Guthrie)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

Over the last few weeks I’ve been polling developers to see how many are using the new Search Engine Optimization (SEO) toolkit to increase traffic to their web-sites.  I’ve been surprised by how many people either have never heard of the tool, or have not yet had a chance to run it against their websites.  This blog post provides a quick summary about why anyone doing web-development should check it out.

Why use the free SEO Toolkit?

In a nutshell – the free SEO Toolkit Analyzer helps you increase traffic and visitors to your site, and as a result can increase the revenue you directly or indirectly make through your web-site.

The SEO Toolkit Analyzer increases traffic to your site by helping you assess and improve the search relevancy ranking of your site with search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  As your search relevancy ranking improves, and your site becomes more search engine optimized, you’ll find that your site receives more and more user traffic from search engine queries.

Takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Analyzer

It takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Toolkit Analyzer against your web-site.  You simply point the tool at the top-level URL of your web-site, and then it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would – following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a human friendly report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site – along with suggestions on how to fix each of them:

It works with any web-server

The SEO Toolkit works with any web-server. It works with IIS5, IIS6, IIS7 and IIS7.5 – it will even work with Apache web-servers running on Linux.  Basically you can point the SEO Analyzer at any remote HTTP server and it will crawl the site and generate a SEO report.  You do not need to setup any software on the remote server – instead the tool crawls and analyzes the site remotely just like a search engine would.  This means you can even run the site on your friends (or potential customers) sites and generate reports for them.

The SEO Toolkit does require that you have the IIS7 Admin tool installed on your local dev/client machine in order to host the SEO Analysis admin UI tool.  The IIS7 admin tool is a built-in feature of Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008.  The IIS7 admin UI only needs to be installed on your local dev machine though – you do not need to have IIS7 installed on the server.  The SEO utility running inside it will work fine against your IIS5, IIS6 and other web servers.

Scott

Published Tuesday, December 15, 2009 12:24 AM

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