SEO toolkit launched by Microsoft

12:00 5th June 2009

Computing giant Microsoft has released a new product for firms improving their search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns.

The IIS SEO Toolkit makes it easier to analyse a website from an SEO perspective and then solve the problems it finds.

In his blog, Scott Guthrie, who has developed a number of products for Microsoft, said small mistakes might impact on the effectiveness of an online portal.

Among the common problems he identified were including multiple URLs which lead to the same content, broken links, and poor titles, descriptions and keywords.

He claimed that minor errors such as these could result in a loss of traffic as SEO suffers, but he claimed the new toolkit from Microsoft could help to prevent this.

Mr Guthrie commented: "The IIS SEO Toolkit makes it easy to analyse and assess how search engine friendly your website is.

"It pinpoints SEO violations, and provides instructions on how to fix them."

The software is free and is currently in the beta release phase so Microsoft is looking for feedback about any issues or suggestions.

Ensuring that a website is properly optimised for search engines could be particularly important in light of research from Forbes.com.

The Ad Effectiveness Survey found that SEO is one of the most effective ways to get conversions in online marketing.