SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the important considerations that any Internet web-site needs to design with in mind. A non-trivial percentage of Internet traffic to sites is driven by search engines, and good SEO techniques can help increase site traffic even further. Likewise, small mistakes can significantly impact the search relevance of your site?s content and cause you to miss out on the traffic that you should be receiving. Some of these mistakes include: multiple URLs on a site leading to the same content, broken links from a page, poorly chosen titles, descriptions, and keywords, large amounts of viewstate, invalid markup, etc. These mistakes are often easy to fix - the challenge is how to discover and pinpoint them within a site.
Introducing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit
Today we are shipping the first beta of a new free tool - the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit - that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it. You can install the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer I blogged about earlier this week. You can install it through WebPI using the ?install now? link on the IIS SEO Toolkit home . Once installed, you?ll find a new ?Search Engine Optimization? section within the IIS 7 admin tool, and several SEO tools available within it: The Robots and SiteMap tools enable you to easily create and manage robots.txt and sitemap.xml files for your site that help guide search engines on what URLs they should and shouldn?t crawl and follow. The Site Analysis tool enables you to crawl a site like a search engine would, and then analyze the content using a variety of rules that help identify SEO, Accessibility, and Performance problems within it.
Using the IIS SEO Toolkit?s Site Analysis Tool
Let?s take a look at how we can use the Site Analysis tool to quickly review SEO issues with a site. To avoid embarrassing anyone else by turning the tool loose on their site, I?ve decided to instead use the analysis tool on one of my own sites: www.scottgu.com . This is a site I wrote many years ago (last update in 2005 I think). If you install the IIS SEO Toolkit you can point it at my site and duplicate the steps below to drill into the SEO analysis of it.
Open the Site Analysis Tool We?ll begin by launching the IIS Admin Tool (inetmgr) and clicking on the root node in the left-pane tree-view of the IIS7 admin tool (the machine name ? in this case ?Scottgu-PC?). We?ll then select the ?Site Analysis? icon within the Search Engine Optimization section on the right. Opening the Site Analysis tool at the machine level like this will allow us to run the analysis tool against any remote server (if we had instead opened it with a site selected then we would only be able to run ...