The Microsoft SEO Toolkit helps web developers, web server administrators, and their SEO teams to improve the overall performance of their website in search results by integrating tests and best practices directly into the IIS platfor–or installed on your Windows computer. Unfortunately, since it is a Microsoft product there is not a Mac version. I have been trying to convince CMS and server platform developers to integrate this functionality for years and now they can do it with a few clicks. This is where it belongs at the infrastructure level not hacking individual pages which is never productive or realistic on large sites.
There are four parts to SEO:
- Inclusion. Getting content stored in search indexes.
- Relevance. Ensuring appropriate keywords are placed in the right areas of your content.
- Authority. Developing high quality and relevant links from external sites to your content.
- Clickability. Ensuring that an enticing title and snippet is displayed in the search results.
The Microsft SEO Toolkit can improve the first two elements above, which are typically the hardest to manage at scale. These effective modules let the server administrators or search effectiveness teams perform detailed analysis and offer recommendations and editing tools for multiple issues, encompassing inclusion, links, and on-page attributes, as well as robots management and XML Sitemap creation and management.
The components of the Toolkit include the following features:
Site Analysis
Microsoft’s site analysis capabilities include the following components:
- Site crawler. To perform detailed analysis of site’s structure and content, Site Analysis tool uses a built-in web crawler, called “iisbot,” to download and cache all the publicly available web site content. The web crawler is fully compliant with the robots exclusion protocol.
- Report summary dashboard. The results of site analysis are presented in an easy to use dashboard page that serves as a start page for various types of analysis. In addition this page includes a large set of pre-built queries for most common reports.
- Query builder. Site Analysis tool includes a powerful and flexible query builder user interface that lets you create any custom queries that are run against the cached web site content.
- Detailed URL information. You can obtain various detailed information about every URL in your web site, such as response headers and content, the pages that link to that URL as well as all the referenced URLs.
- Detailed violations descriptions. Each content or SEO violation found on a web site has a detailed description as well as a recommended corrective action.
- Word Analysis. Any web page can be analyzed with regards to the most commonly used words and phrases within the content of that page. The results of that analysis can be used to select the keywords that most accurately describe the content of the page.
- Route Analysis. Unique routes to any page can be displayed in a separate report. This kind of information helps better understand how search engine and site visitors reach a particular page on your web site.
Robots Exclusion Management
Microsoft’s robots exclusion management includes the following:
- User interface for editing robots.txt file. The content of the robots exclusion file, robots.txt, can be edited by using IIS Manager GUI.
- Selecting URL paths from physical view of website. The paths that are specified for “Allow” and “Disallow” directives in robots.txt file can be selected from the physical file system layout of your web site.
- Selecting URL paths from virtual view of website. The paths that are specified for “Allow” and “Disallow” directives in robots.txt file can be selected from the logical view of your web site obtained from the results of site analysis.
Sitemaps and Sitemap Index Management
Microsoft’s Sitemaps and Sitemap Index Management includes:
- User interface for managing sitemap and sitemap indexes files. The content of the sitemap and indexes files can be edited by using IIS Manager GUI.
- Selecting URLs from physical view of website. The URLs that are specified within a sitemap can be selected from the physical file system layout of your web site.
- Selecting URLs from virtual view of website. The URLs that are specified within a sitemap can be selected from the logical view of your web site obtained from the results of site analysis.
You can download and install the program on your Windows computer or–better yet–install it directly into your IIS7 Server.
Additional Resources:
The detailed manual from Microsoft:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/639/using-iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit/
A detailed overview of the functionality:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/06/03/iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit.aspx