Microsoft SEO Toolkit – on-page analysis on Steroids
Friday may have arrived and it may be a bridge day; that does not mean we take time off from our blog. Our aim today is to praise a Microsoft tool; probably the most underrated SEO tool out there, namely the SEO Toolkit.
To be able to use this great tool you need a Windows computer running IIS (Internet Information Services), as this SEO Toolkit is an addition to IIS. You Mac-users (unless you are running Windows) can of course consider replacing your operating system or use a VPS server.
Install SEO Toolkit
1. As a start; install Microsoft Web Platform Installer 3.0 – it will facilitate the installation of IIS.
2. Install SEO Toolkit. Once you have it installed it should appear in IIS automatically; although I reserve myself from any mistakes, because after all it is Microsoft we are working with. Search the start menu for “enable or disable Windows features”, which will show a box with all Windows features that are enabled on your computer. Ensure that the folder World Wide Web Services is checked (Internet Information Services must also be checked, but it probably is already) – then press OK.
3. Start the SEO Toolkit – you will find it under: Programs -> IIS 7.0 Extensions> Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit 1.0
What now? What is possible with SEO Toolkit?
With SEO Toolkit, it is easy to walk through your web site to find “errors” that occur on the web site. To start the walk-through, simply press “Create new analysis” and follow instructions on the screen.
By default, there are several errors that are automatically pinpointed. For example, creating an analysis for bebetteronline.se will result in the following errors:
58 sites have no meta description
5 pages have too long title tag
5 pages have too short meta description
4 pages have a link to an URL that returns “error” sites
Two sides do not have a h1 heading
There are more of interest to be found during our analysis. For example, we see which web sites that have the greatest numbers of internal inbound links to itself, which sites that take most time to upload, which images that miss an alt description – as you can imagine, most of your web site information is shown here.
As with Google Analytics, we can create our own “reports” – called Query in SEO Toolkit. By creating our own Query, we can simplify some steps when working with On-Page Optimization. You can easily create a Query to find pages on your site with for example links with anchor texts such as “here”, “click here” etc. We can also create reports to find out which pages our keywords occur in the title tag.
I am going to follow up with more information on SEO toolkit and how to create customized reports; this in a post in the future. But first I would like to know; what exactly would you like to find out by using SEO Toolkit? Try it out for yourself, play around with the SEO Toolkit, and please leave a comment if you have any concerns.
Was this content satisfactory? If so, push it on pusha.se!