Download the New IIS SEO Toolkit Beta
Do you ever wonder what it would be like to tirelessly explore the Internet as a search engine crawler? What would you find? Would the sites you meet help you or are you on your own? Would the sites tell you where important information lives or must you scour even further? Would the sites tell you how often they are updated or would you just have to figure it out? What info do you pass on to your human overlords? Were the sites even built with you in mind? The internet can feel like a big daunting place to search engine crawlers, so let’s do our part to help out. Enter the world of Search Engine Optimization.
Today, Microsoft is announcing the IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit Beta – brand new tools that help Web developers, hosting providers, and server administrators improve their sites’ relevance in search results by recommending how to make them more search engine-friendly, which is especially important now, because we all need to play nice with the new kid, Bing. The IIS SEO Toolkit includes three modules that integrate with IIS Manager: Site Analysis, Robots Exclusion, and Sitemaps and Site Indexes.
The Site Analysis module suggests changes that can help improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines. Site Analysis allows users to analyze local and external Web sites with the purpose of optimizing the site’s content, structure, and URLs for search engine crawlers.
The Robots Exclusion module makes it easier to control and restrict the content that search engines index and display. Robots Exclusion enables Web site owners to manage the robots.txt file from within the IIS Manager interface. This file is used to control the indexing of specified URLs, by disallowing search engine crawlers from accessing them.
The Sitemaps and Site Indexes module can help inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing. Sitemaps and Site Indexes enables Web site owners to manage the sitemap files and sitemap indexes on the site, application, and folder level to help keep search engines up to date, including the most important URLs listed and ranked in the sitemap.xml file.
So don’t forget about one of your most important customers with no voice (or arms, or legs, just crawly thingies) and help out the search engine crawlers of the World Wide Web. The IIS SEO Toolkit Beta can be installed with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta for use with IIS 7.0 and IIS 7.5. Also, be sure to check out other IIS Extensions from Microsoft.
Eric Rezabek
Senior Product Manager
IIS/Web
