Websites need more than a search decision engine to make themselves visible out of the overload of information in over 1 trillion pages of content Microsoft estimates are live at the moment. Provided that websites are leveraging Internet Information Services, the Redmond company is now offering a collection of tools designed especially to increase visibility with search engines, completely free of charge. In this sense, web developers, hosting providers, and web server administrators can start taking advantage immediately of the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit for IIS. Microsoft is promising that the toolkit will help drive an increase in traffic by making content on websites search-engine friendly.

“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,” revealed Lauren Cooney, GPM, Web Platform and Standards, Developer Division, Microsoft.

In order to make SEO easy, the toolkit packages a total of three tools: Site Analysis, Robots Exclusion, and Sitemaps and Site Indexes. The three modules in the SEO Toolkit for IIS streamline the process of performing detailed evaluations of websites, and deliver the editing tools, along with the necessary guidance and recommendations to manage the Robots and Sitemap files.

“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 (...). 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,” explained Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division.