There are 3 things I’m truly passionate about: technology, developers and users, and simplicity of products and solutions. Today we’re announcing something that falls into all 3 categories – and I’m very excited.
The IIS SEO Toolkit (beta) is a collection of free, easy to use tools that help you improve your website’s relevance in search results – by recommending how to make them more search friendly. You can download it via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta.
Essentially, there are 3 tools that make up the IIS SEO Toolkit - Site Analysis, which suggests changes that can help improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines; Robots Exclusion, which makes it easier to control and restrict the content that search engines index and display; and Sitemaps and Site Indexes, which can help inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing.
SEO should not be hard. It’s not meant to be rocket science – but frankly, it’s more difficult than we think. I’ve read various different tutorials and articles and it gets really frustrating for me, as a lightweight developer, to figure out the best way to improve my search rankings on Google. (yeah, I said it – so there :) ). This toolkit fills the gaps for me – someone with my skill set can just plug my URL into the tool and poof! - - I get reporting on various links, info on page load time, info on user routes, and lots more. And it works for any website – not just sites built with Microsoft products. For example Digg could use this to see how well their website is search engine optimized. Just run it and go.
The IIS SEO Toolkit is great for you if you want to -
•Optimize the content and structure of URLs and your site content for search engines
•Drill down into how to optimize the Web sites tagging, links and other site structure
•Make all pages on my site easily discoverable by search engines
•Check to see if all pages on your site load correctly and don’t break when I make a change
Essentially, the SEO Toolkit provides assistance with 2 areas when looking to improve your website:
(1) Site Intelligence
•Reporting and error identification for broken/invalid links, duplicate content, tag validation, etc.
•Visibility into user routes, referring pages and other patterns
•Drilldown into page resource usage and load time
(2) Search Relevance
•Best practice rules for optimizing URL structure for search engines
•Automatic generation of search engine support files
It’s a great product – and we’re really excited about this. This is part of our larger effort over here on the Microsoft Web Platform team to make great products that help developers and users build amazing and successful web solutions. This is the first of MUCH more to come over here – so stay tuned./LC
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