The Art of SEO and IIS

If you develop/design public websites for your customers, you likely already know first-hand how important a good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is to its success. Generating traffic to a website is hard and is downright impossible to do well without making it easy for internet search engines like Bing, Google or Yahoo! to find the content on your site and index it properly for search queries.

Anybody that has been following most of the events I have been presenting of late knows that I think the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (WPI) is kind of a big thing. If you’ve seen or played with the WPI, you know how useful it can be for laying the groundwork for you to build your web solution on top of. If you haven’t seen it yet, it may interest you to watch my webcast on the WPI on-demand here. You may be wondering how the WPI and SEO are linked. Well, today, Microsoft announced a new feature added to the WPI called the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. You can download the SEO toolkit on its own from the link, but most web developers/designers building a site hosted on IIS will use the WPI to install it.

The initial announcement of this new feature of IIS came from the blog of Microsoft’s corporate VP for the .NET Developer Platform and serious technical wizard, Scott Guthrie. He gives a very detailed tour of the IIS SEO Toolkit in that post so if you want to know the nitty gritty details, I would invite you to take a look at the post.

In a nutshell, the IIS7 SEO Toolkit can:

Improve the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines
Control how search engines access and display your web content
Tell search engines about locations on your site available for indexing

The IIS7 SEO Toolkit contains:

Site Analysis tools to help you identify and fix SEO-related issues on your site
User friendly tools to manage robot and spider exclusions
A user interface for sitemaps and managing sitemap indices

Below are important links for the IIS7 SEO Toolkit: