IIS 7 SEO Toolkit

Launched early June ’09, the IIS 7 SEO toolkit is designed for web developers and administrators maintaining huge websites. A module that easily installs to you IIS 7 this toolkit gives you the ability to check your website for inconsistencies regarding SEO.

The toolkit has three main components:

1. Site Analysis
2. Sitemaps and Sitemap Indexes
3. Robots Exclusion

Of the three, I have only used Site Analysis so far. Even though being a third of the toolkit, the Site Analysis alone will give you enough insight into your website with considerable action on your part. If you don’t know anything about SEO, this toolkit will definitely overwhelm you. The Site Analysis will be going through every link in your site and evaluate it based on a number of SEO criteria. A quick analysis of my site would show you how many SEO standards I have already broken. Strange considering my site is small and I try my best to fill up every detail that I can with my Platinum SEO toolkit plugin for WordPress.

Let’s see how a standard Site Analysis would look like.

Running the analysis on my site would give you the initial Site Analysis Report Summary

These are basic SEO knowledge that everybody with a website should know. By the looks of it I’ve been skipping a lot of details when I’m putting up new posts.

You can then drill down to a specific entry to see how many of times you violated it.

The best part is when you don’t know that specific error, you can drill down and it will give you a description so that you won’t make the same mistake again.

And it will even show you where in the code your error is. From here you can then base your next steps to resolve this “problem”. I found this really helpful especially since I assumed everything would work out fine since I’m using WordPress and a number of its plugins. Apparently you still have to check some of the code within. So far I haven’t dissected it and I still rely on the plug-ins as I found this enough for my blogging needs. Obviously, the toolkit is designed for more than just blogs.

More screenshots of the SiteMap and Robots Exclusion

Sitemap

I’m satisfied with WordPress sitemap plug-ins and thus I don’t really care about this one.

Robots exclusion allows you to tell where the crawler should go to. WP has the same feature and I don’t know much about site crawlers yet to care.

Well that’s a quick intro to IIS 7 SEO Toolkit. Given more time I would definitely like to explore how they define the SEO criteria. There’s probably a document for this but as of now I can’t find any within the MS sites.

Again, this tool is not for everybody as not all has access to their IIS but for sure website admins would definitely benefit from this.

Links you need to read if you want to know more:

http://www.iis.net/extensions/SEOToolkit

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/639/using-iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit/

http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/643/iis-site-analysis—video-walkthrough/

Give me a shout out if you discover something interesting with the toolkit or if you found the docu. 🙂

~Eugene