Announcing: IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta 1

Today we are releasing the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. The IIS SEO Toolkit is a set of features that aim to help you keep your Web site and its content in good shape for both Users and Search Engines.

The features that are included in this Beta release include:

• Site Analysis. This feature includes a crawler that starts looking at your Web site contents, discovering links, downloading the contents and applying a set of validation rules aimed to help you easily troubleshoot common problems such as broken links, duplicate content, keyword analysis, route analysis and many more features that will help you improve the overall quality of your Web site.
• Robots Exclusion Editor. This includes a powerful editor to author Robots Exclusion files. It can leverage the output of a Site Analysis crawl report and allow you to easily add the Allow and Disallow entries without having to edit a plain text file, making it less error prone and more reliable. Furthermore, you can run the Site Analysis feature again and see immediately the results of applying your robots files.
• Sitemap and Sitemap Index Editor. Similar to the Robots editor, this allows you to author Sitemap and Sitemap Index files with the ability to discover both physical and logical (Site Analysis crawler report) view of your Site.

Checkout the great blog about IIS SEO Toolkit by ScottGu, or this IIS SEO simple video of some of its capabilities.

Run it in your Development, Staging, or Production Environments

One of the problems with many similar tools out there is that they require you to publish the updates to your production sites before you can even use the tools, and of course would never be usable for Intranet or internal applications that are not exposed to the Web. The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit can be used internally in your own development or staging environments giving you the ability to clean up the content before publishing to the Web. This way your users do not need to pay the price of broken links once you publish to the Web and you will not need to wait for those tools or Search Engines to crawl your site to finally discover you broke things.

For developers this means that they can now easily look at the potential impact of removing or renaming a file, easily check which files are referring to this page and which files he can remove because of only being referenced by this page.

Run it against any Web application built on any framework running in any server

One thing that is important to clarify is that you can target and analyze your production sites if you want to, and you can target Web applications running in any platform, whether its ASP.NET, PHP, or plain HTML text files running in your local IIS or on any other remote server.

Bottom line, try it against your Web site, look at the different features and give us feedback for additional reports, options, violations, content to parse, etc, post any comments or questions at the IIS Search Engine Optimization Forum.

The IIS SEO Toolkit documentation can be found at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/639/using-iis-search-engine-optimization-toolkit/, but remember this is only Beta 1 so we will be adding more features and content.