Microsoft Announces IIS SEO Toolkit Beta

The Beta version of Microsoft's IIS SEO Toolkit was recently released to be used with the Microsoft Web Platform. It's a three module kit that integrates with the IIS Manager and is most likely geared for their new search engine, Bing. However, it follows the best practices established throughout the rest of the web, and it should provide quality suggestions for optimizing your site for all search engines.

What Is in the IIS SEO Toolkit

The first module, Site Analysis, runs through your website to determine what problems could be keeping it back and out of sight from search engines. It includes a dashboard which allows you to view the results of the site analysis in summary form, a crawl engine named “iisbot”, route analysis, and more. This module does many of the things that an analytics company would do.

The second module is the Robot Exclusions Features which allow you to easily configure the robots.txt file and set the allows and disallows quickly. The third module, Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features, provides an interface to create, edit, and manage your sitemap.

How the IIS SEO Toolkit Can Help

While Bing may not be the “Google-killer” Microsoft would like it to be, the premise of the search engine is promising and may be attractive enough to users to attract a large crowd. With the opening of Bing being so close to the release of this toolkit, it's fairly certain that it will include features geared for Bing. But it doesn't only help you with results on that engine because it still provides suggestions which are applicable to all of the current search engine technologies.