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:
The IIS7 SEO Toolkit contains:
Below are important links for the IIS7 SEO Toolkit:
So if you’re building public websites where traffic is an important consideration, you may want to check this tool out.
-Paul
As a solution provider, the web presents an ever increasing opportunity to grow your business. As more and more customers (and potential customers!) look to the web as a way to broaden their message, increase their own revenue and lower their cost of doing business in general, you have the opportunity to make a real impact to those businesses with the skills you have in building web solutions.
It is for this reason that Microsoft Canada has created the Make Web, Not War Episode 2009 in-person event. We know that Microsoft technologies are only part of a larger ecosystem of web platform technologies out there. What many people may not realize is that Microsoft is playing an ever increasing role in reaching out to web solution providers that aren’t traditionally building web software on Windows.
Make Web, Not War Episode 2009 is a 2-city tour reaching out to web solution enthusiasts, whether you build your solutions on Windows or not. The Vancouver stop is on Tuesday, June 2nd and the Toronto stop is on Wednesday, June 10. For details on the specific agenda items for each of these cities, please visit the website but in a nutshell, we have a number of speakers from both enterprise and open source communities speaking about how Windows is a great platform to build web solutions on. It will certainly not be the only platform you will likely build web solutions on, but you may very well find that expanding your skillsets to include providing Windows-based web solutions may well be worth your while.
Value Proposition:
Some of the topics we’ll be covering between Vancouver and Toronto:
There is still limited seating available for both Vancouver and Toronto, so if you’re interested please register online at Make Web, Not War Episode 2009!