IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta - Hard to Find but Maybe Useful

IIS SEO Toolkit Beta is part of Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta and as Lauren Cooney and Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal reported it was released on June 3rd. However the link from Lauren Cooney’s post send you to an older version of the installer so you better use the Search Engine Journal one, which points to the SEO Toolkit’s Web Page on IIS Web Site.

How to Install and Run It

Starting the download presents you with a cluttered UI where you can select bunch of things. Initially I wasn’t able to spot the toolkit option and had to click on the tabs and read every entry but when it seems What’s New tab proved to be the right place anyway (see the picture below). Download is only 0.5 MB and the installation is quite fast.

If you expected to have stand alone application then you will be… heh, surprised, disappointed or whatever feeling you find appropriate. I was just frustrated because I couldn’t get to it immediately and had to read the IIS SEO Toolkit documentation. The tool is part of IIS Manager However I found the IIS Site Analysis - Video Walkthrough quite useful.

Running the Site Analysis tool on my blog spitted out the following results:

First Impressions

At first I was shocked to see that I have 15 broken links (of course I started with the red line items:)) on the site but after some digging into the report I found out that the tool considers the beacons (1px GIFs) as broken links (those are coming from the Amazon affiliate links). A little bit annoying because lot of sites still use the beacons for affiliate links. It may become tedious tasks to sort out all those “broken” links from the real ones.

I was also quite confused with the number of errors and warnings I received but after careful analysis it came out that all those were valid.

It was disappointing that the Robots Exclusion and Sitemap and Site Indexes tools from the toolkit work only on sites living on the local machine. It would be useful to get those available for any web site.

The Useful Features

In just a few minutes I was able to identify quite two-three things I had to fix on my blog:

• It seems I had a broken link in one of my posts that generated lot of noise in the report. Most of the errors and warnings were reported because this broken link. My suggestion would be to keep track of the broken links and not use those pages in the other reports.
• It seems I have to remove few directories from the crawling list to avoid multiple canonical formats issues.

The Site Analysis tool provides good statistics and information about:

• HTTP Headers
• Page title
• Page description
• Page keywords (outdated concept for SEO though)
• Page headings
• Page information like encoding, content type, last modified etc.
• Performance information like size and time to download
• Word analysis like words counts (total and unique), 2 word phrases, 3 word phrases (something useful would be keyword density and prominence)
• Link analysis like inbound links, outbound links, link paths etc. as well as link text information

In general the tool is a good start and can be a base for something very useful. It is only Beta 1 and according to the announcement made by CarlosAg from IIS Product Team there will be more features coming. People dealing with SEO have a long list of features they would like to see in such a tool and hopefully they will not get disappointed.