And up for grabs from Microsoft

Nov 27, 2009 12:33 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has wrapped up and made available for download a solution designed to allow website owners and administrators to optimize content for search engines. Set up to work in conjunction with Internet information Services, the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is available as a free download from the Redmond company. Specifically, following implementation, this SEO IIS extension will drive up both the volume and quality of traffic from search engines to a specific website. To put it simply, the IIS SEO Toolkit RTW is a must have IIS volume for IIS customers looking not only to boost traffic but also kick up a notch the level of user experience for their online properties.

“The IIS SEO Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit helps to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines, control how search engines access and display Web content, and inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing,” revealed Eric Rezabek, senior product manager IIS/Web.

Customers will find that Microsoft has developed the IIS SEO Toolkit to act much in the same manner as any search engine would, when it comes down to crawling a website. But, as far as this tool is concerned, the magic only starts after the crawling is done. The IIS SEO Toolkit features a number of components designed to give as much control as possible to customers, including a Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module. The toolkit will start by performing an exhaustive analysis of a website, but will deliver recommendations, guidance and even editing tools to deal with SEO problems as well as with Robots and Sitemaps files management tasks.

Below, you will be able to find a list with all the features that the IIS SEO Toolkit brings to the table, according to Microsoft:

"Site Analysis Features:

- Fully featured crawler engine - Configurable number of concurrent requests to allow users to crawl their Web site without incurring additional processing. This can be configured from 1 to 16 concurrent requests. - Support for Robots.txt, allowing you to customize the locations where the crawler should analyze and which locations should be ignored. - Support for Sitemap files allowing you to specify additional locations to be analyzed. - Support for overriding ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ metatags to allow you to analyze pages to help improve customer experience even when search engines will not process them. - Configurable limits for analysis, maximum number of URLs to download, and maximum number of kilobytes to download per URL. - Configurable options for including content from only your directories or the entire site and sub domains. - View detailed summary of Web site analysis results through a rich dashboard - Feature rich Query Builder interface that allows you to build custom reports - Quick access to common tasks - Display of detailed information for each URL - View detailed route analysis showing unique routes to better understand the way search engines reach your content

Robots Exclusion Features:

- Display of robots content in a friendly user interface - Support for filtering, grouping, and sorting - Ability to add ‘disallow’ and ‘allow’ paths using a logical view of your Web site from the result of site analysis processing - Ability to add sitemap locations

Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features:

- Display of sitemaps and sitemap index files in a simple user interface - Support for grouping and sorting - Ability to add/edit/remove sitemap and sitemap index files - Ability to add new URL’s to sitemap and sitemap index files using a physical or logical view of your Web site - Ability to register a sitemap or sitemap index into the robots exclusion file."