Well it seems that Search Engines are giving more and more prominence to helping people do better SEO. I haven’t (yet) personally tried the Microsoft tool kit, but it definitely qualifies as a good free resource. Especially for Small Businesses. To balance the equation, I have also linked below to the Google Guide to SEO, and one of my favourite at a glance SEO tools, SEO xray.
SEO Tool Kit by Microsoft
Microsoft SEO toolkit
Download here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/seo/
You can point the site analysis tool in the Toolkit at the top-level URL of your web-site, and it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would – following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site – along with suggestions on how to fix each of them.
Google SEO Guide
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide
Download here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf
This document first began as an effort to help teams within Google, but we thought it’d be just as useful to webmasters that are new to the topic of search engine optimization and wish to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and search engines. Although this guide won’t tell you any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first for queries in Google (sorry!), following the best practices outlined below will make it easier for search engines to both crawl and index your content.
SEO Xray for FireFox
SEO for Firefox: SEO X-ray
Download here: http://www.seobook.com/seo-firefox-now-seo-x-ray
You must use Firefox 3.0 or above to see these features, but if you want to see…
- how the on page optimization of any page looks (headings, meta description, page title)
- the keyword density of the page and popular phrases on the page
- how many links point into a page (total links, or links from external resources)
- how many links point out of a page (as well as the anchor text of these links, nofollow vs follow, internal vs external – all exportable in CSV format)
then this new feature makes it quick and easy to do all of that. Simply right click on the page you are viewing, scroll down to SEO for Firefox, and click on SEO X-ray.
Rishi Lakhani is an independent Online Marketing Consultant specialising in SEO, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and Social Media. Explicitly.Me is his Blog. Google Profile
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Hey, good update on the Microsoft SEO toolkit – however it still requires you to have either Vista or Windows7 for desktop side usage. Or for server side it requires MS Server 2008 & IIS7 – which isnt in widespread usage. Doubtful that MS will release it backwards compatability to IIS6 tho… So guess gives added reasons to why we its useful to have a copy of Windows7 , even if its running on VMware or such.