Today I checked out the new IIS 7 SEO Toolkit, and I have to say I am really impressed with this tool.

The Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is a free IIS extension that you install on your web server.  When you run the tool, the IIS-Bot crawls the target site and returns a list of recommendations.  The target site can be located on the same server, or any website on the Internet.

The tool is so simple to install and use. I included a few images below of my first experience using it.

After installing the toolkit, a new option called Site Analysis shows up in the list of options.

Under the list of Actions on the right side, click New Analysis... 

In the New Analysis window, enter the name of the site and the Start URL.  I entered my wife's site in the example below.

After clicking the OK button, the tool returns a list of violations and recommendations to help you improve your site.  It even explains each issue in detail.  The result below recommends that I add <H1> tags to each page on my wife's site, something I overlooked when creating her site.  I'll have to fix that first chance I get!

I decided to run the tool on a website I plan to do some SEO work on in the near future.  It is a site that was original created in PHP [by someone else] that I plan to convert to ASP.NET.  According to the analysis, there are 354 current violations.  It looks like I have my work cut out for me!

As you can see below, the tool will find problems such as images without ALT tags, missing description meta tags, URL's with multiple canonical formats [something commonly found in PHP] and URL's containing too many QueryStrings. 

Conclusion:

This tool is awesome!  What I like most about it is the attention to detail it gives the user.  In less than a minute, I am able to generate a preliminary "To-Do" list for my next SEO project. 

The only complaint I have about the tool is its IIS requirement.  I wish there was a non-IIS version that could be run independantly. 

Although it won't help me with non-technical SEO work such as keyword analysis, branding or writing good content, it does give someone like me more time to focus on improving these areas.

Aaron Wall, here I come!