Jack @ ASP.NET

Why SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any publically facing web-site.  A large percentage of traffic to sites now comes from search engines, and improving the search relevancy of your site will lead to more user traffic to your site from search engine queries (which can directly or indirectly increase the revenue you make through your site).

IIS SEO Toolkit (Search Engine Optimization Toolkit)

The SEO Toolkit helps you improve your Website’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make your new or existing site content and structure more search engine-friendly. It works on any Website on the Web. Best of all – it’s a small, lightweight free download!

ASP.NET 4 SEO Improvements

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of new runtime features that can help you to further optimize your site for SEO.  Some of these new features include:

• New Page.MetaKeywords and Page.MetaDescription properties
• New Response.RedirectPermanent() method
• New URL Routing support for ASP.NET Web Forms

You can use the above routes and methods for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC based URLs.

ASP.NET 4 includes a bunch of feature improvements that make it easier to build public facing sites that have great SEO.  When combined with the SEO Toolkit, you should be able to use these features to increase user traffic to your site – and hopefully increase the direct or indirect revenue you make from them.

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is an IIS7 extension that helps identify search engine and user experience optimizations for Web sites. The following features are included:
Site Intelligence

• Reporting and error identification for broken/invalid links, duplicate content, tag validation, etc.
• Visibility into user routes, referring pages and other patterns
• Drilldown into page resource usage and load time

Search Relevance

• Best practice rules for optimizing URL structure for search engines
• Extensibility model to enable integration for keyword acquisition
• Automatic generation of search engine support files like sitemaps and robots.txt

Key Features including

• Improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines
• Control how search engines access and display Web content
• Inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing
• Site Analysis Features
• Robots Exclusion Features
• Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features

Instructions

You will need to run the installation package as an administrator. This can be accomplished by one of the following methods:

• Logging in to your server as an administrator account and then double-clicking on the MSI file.
• Logging on using an account with administrator privileges and opening a command-prompt by right-clicking the Command Prompt menu item that is located in the Accessories menu for Windows programs and selecting "Run as administrator", then typing one of the commands listed below:
  msiexec /I IISSEO_x86.msi
  msiexec /I IISSEO_x64.msi

It takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Toolkit Analyzer against your web-site.  You simply point the tool at the top-level URL of your web-site, and then it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would – following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a human friendly report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site – along with suggestions on how to fix each of them.

If you haven’t downloaded the SEO Toolkit and used it to analyzer your web-site yet, then spend 10 minutes now and give it a try.  You’ll find it provides a really easy, automated way to quickly find and identify SEO issues you have on your web-site – along with suggestions on how to fix them.  Fixing them will increase the traffic and visitors to your web-site.