Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit

84 Comments

• Definately going to try this out!
  
  -- Lee
  

• Thanx a ton Scott, yeah i haven't heard about it, so following you on twitter helped me :-)
  

• Yes, it is a fantastic tool.
  In addition with basic SEO in ASP.NET MVC, it rocks!
  

• Getting a message "Your Platform is not supported". Say. IIS6, German Windows 2003 Server.
  

• This is an excellent guide to a very useful tool! As well as assisting with SEO, this tool is also a good way to improve accessibility.
  

• when i tries to install IIS7 admin UI, it says IIS7 required. I have windows Xp and IIS 5.1. any idea?
  

• I'd never heard of this either; thanks for the tweet.
  

• Can't install it, after installing the WPI I click on the 'Finish' link and it opens in the WPI but a message says my operating system is not supported! I'm on Win XP SP3. Something gone wrong somewhere.
  

• 
  Please help:
  
  I am getting an error something like this: "The product you are trying to install is not supported by the current operating system"
  

• The only thing I really do not understand is why is this a "plugin" for ISS?
  Why not a standalone application?
  Is there any particular reason?
  

• I've already used it, it's a great tool!!
  

• Hey Scott,
  
  This is a great utility that's helped me out a ton on an old, OLD classic ASP site.
  
  Have you guys considered increasing visibility of this by adding it to the WPI?
  
  Cheers,
  -James
  

• Scott,
  
  Just an idea: would it not be nice if this tool integrated with VS some?
  Especially errors like "multiple canonical formats" could be fixed with one push of the button (mostly). For some other problems you of course couldn't do more than jump to the right page, and select the relevant html. You could even integrate it into the 'Error List' pane, as a type of error besides error, warning and message.
  

• Scott,
  
  Sounds like a cool tool but I feel that the major fail point is that you have to install it. It would be cool if MS would provide a hosted version (or browser plugin) that a casual user can use. I (and less tech savvy coworkers) would be more likely to use an internet hosted version rather than an IIS module.
  

• Apparently Phil Haack uses it to restore websites that were not properly backed up in the first place.
  
  http://haacked.com/archive/2009/12/14/seo-toolkit-saves-the-day.aspx
  
  

• It's a great tool; we started using it last week against our newly rebuilt site (which, of course, destroyed our page ranking) and we got a goldmine of helpful info.
  

• This is Good tool.
  

• I used this tool on a couple of my sites I only have three up and running and I 'm getting 80% of my hits from search engines and with this new bit of info from Phil Haack this has got to be one of the fanciest tools ever built it's the only thing I've seen that generates hits for real it takes about a month to get re indexed by the search engines then you start seeing results it also brought up my page ranking
  great little tool
  

• Cannot find SEO under What's new as said: The SEO toolkit can be found in the ‘What’s New’ tab in the ‘Web Platform Beta Extensions’ section.
  

• Odd, I downloaded the applications, installed everything but I can't find out where to activate the SEO Toolkit from.
  

• what a great SEO tool! and it's FREE!!! Will be giving it a try as soon as I get home.
  

• The problem with this is the requirement of Vista or higher. I'd love to run this against my company's sites, but I am running XP so I appear to be SOL. I can jump through some hoops to get a Vista/7 VPC up and running, but I'd rather run this on my dev box.
  

• no joy installing this tool on a win xp sp3 machine.
  

• First WPI could not find the tool automatically. I had to point WPI to it after installation.
  Second WinXP SP3 is not supported :(
  I think I tried installing it before but didn't get too far, so I gave up and forgot all about it.
  

• Thank you for sharing. I'm about to enroll in a program for certification in SEO and SEM and I am certain your tool kit will be a practical supplement. That's in a few weeks from now. I noticed the link to your video, so for the time being I am going to put my eyeballs on that and soak it up. Thanks again.
  

• Nice share! I am a fan of ASP and love to see this toolkit being shared so openly with the rest of the web dev community.
  

• Great article. But any idea where I can get an SEO for Dummies . I understand this stuff just enough to let somebody pick up where I left off without to much trouble. I would like to know more however, so any books you could direct me to would be fab-o..
  

• A good news to webmasters! currently, php is most webmasters choice, but more and more webmasters come to asp.net now
  

• Nice post...
  Your blog is really helpful to my Friend who is working on.net platform..
  

• Why does it have to be run with administrator privileges?
  
  

• That's a strong tool. Finds a lot of both major and minor issues very fast.
  

• Thank you for a nice tip !
  

• I'm also getting the error "The product you are trying to install is not supported on your operating system" - and followed the link but didn't get any wiser - googled bu no answer yet
  

• I think this tool require IIS 7 to be installed on your computer. What's a pity :(
  

• Great tool for webmasters .
  Ping back from SEO Tool KIT
  http://himabinduvejella.blogspot.com/2009/12/seo-toolkit.html
  

• great tool for webmaster.
  

• Hi Sir,
  
  Can you please give us an idea on whether ASP.Net MVC framework is SEO friendly ? If so then can you please give us short description on that ?
  
  Thanks,
  Thani
  

• Come on! No i've used my time installing yet another MS thingy that i don't know what do, Web Platform Installer. And now when i try to install the SEO toolkit it tells me that my operating system is not supported, i click the link and it says that Windows® XP Professional Edition Service Pack 2 (SP2) or SP3 is supported, just what i am running (SP3, danish).
  
  How hard can it be?
  

• Thanks very much... downloading now and letting some friends know! Perfect - thank you.
  

• Interesting, I will try it and give you feed back if it actally works. I have tried many ways to increas traffic and none seem to work. Fingers Crossed with this one.
  

• It will be a better tool when its possible to switch off features. For example, my site includes a blog of information that's useful to clients. Each summary on the main blog pages are followed by a 'Read more...' link which, because there are many such links, the tool reports as a violation. No, they are not and the *many* false positives it generates makes it difficult to see the genuine problems. Like many MS tools I'm sure this one will improve with age.
  

• Nice. This is very much like googles webmaster tools which has been around for quite a few years already. Regardless, good to know we have an alternative now.
  
  Thanks for posting
  

• Get a message stating my operating system is not supported yet I'm on Xp Pro SP3. Usual story - don't test it, don't promote it, it doesn't work. So back to Google Analytics/Webmaster Tools I go
  

• I am using this from when you demo'd it in manchester back in the autumn. It has saved lots of time - and helped get sites ranked higher - whoooo hoooo!
  

• Hi, Scott, thanks for your recommendation and I will download and use it immediately
  

• I can't get this to install. Rather Web Platform installer just comes back with a msg "the product you are trying to install is not support on your operating system". On the two machines I have tried, both are running XP SP 3.
  

• Agreed that this tool should be hosted to improve utility and remove installation problems like those listed here.
  
  

• Would be great not to need IIS for this tool
  

• A great and helpful tool for any webadmin!
  
  Another useful tool is wespiva, a WEb-SPIder-VAlidator, which traverses a web-site and checks all html on all pages. It detects bad xhtml, broken links, and does some other checks.
  
  See www.wissing.com/wespiva
  
  (needs .NET, free download and use, written in C#)
  

• This is so awesome. I never knew it existed. Thanks!
  

• Installed SEO toolkit on Win2008 server. Run against site on Win2K3 with IIS6. After running for some time, error popped up:
  "There was an error while performing this operation.
  Invalid name character in '_META_LINKSITE_{SECURE}'.
  The '{' character, hexadecimal value 0x7B cannot be included in a name."
  
  Unusable.
  

• I don't understand why people reply to an article that specifically states that only Vista, Win7, and Server 2008 are supported, to complain that it doesn't work on XP and Server 2003.
  

• It won't install on my Windows XP Pro SP3 machine. "The product you are trying to install is not supported on your operating system. Click here for more information."
  
  It does show XP Pro SP3 as a supported OS.
  

• I'm receiving this error when running this against my site:
  
  There was an error while performing this operation.
  
  Details:
  Invalid name character in '_META_RSS:Language'. The ':' character, hexadecimal value 0x3A, cannot be included in a name.
  
  I've looked through the output files and found that the page in question is on an external site but I don't see how to restrict the SEO Toolkit from following those links.
  

• um, who decided that this "tool" was best served inside of the IIS console?! really?!
  
  great tool though, but its been relegated to the "great idea, silly implementation category"
  

• Please tell your audience that (after spending lots of time trying) that there are a few dependencies you NEED to meet in order to use the SEO Toolkit:
  
  - You NEED to be running IIS v7 (although it can check sites hosted on other IIS versions).
  -- IIS 7 is only installable on the more robust versions of Vista or Windows 7 (i.e. Premium and Ultimate)
  
  This means that if you're running XP, you're SOL. If you're running a "lite" Vista or Windows 7, you're also SOL.
  
  I would _love_ to try this out, but sadly, I can't.
  
  Here's an idea that may be worth pondering, from someone who owns a site that meets the necessary minimum qualifications: Offer SEO scans for free.
  
  It would be great if a site with some decent user authentication could offer free runs of this against sites - maybe as a service to customers by allowing users to submit an e-mail address and site address, and get back an authentication code by e-mail (only 1 run per site/e-mail address per day to prevent overwhelming a free service)?
  
  Doable?
  
  Thanks.
  

• I also get the "The product you are tring to install is not supported on your operating system."
  This happens with Win Xp SP3.
  Go figure...
  

• can I use this with windows 7?
  

• Thanks for taking the effort of providing us with this wonderful tools. Their feature and usability are worth trying for.
  

• Thanks for the information, i am going to try this...
  

• Looks like a useful tool for webmasters and seo's alike
  
  Are there plans to link the toolset into the bing webmaster tools?
  

• for those with XP Pro SP3... the Microsoft Web Platform Installer that you downloaded and installed first is compatible with XP SP3. The SEO toolkit requires the IIS7 admin tool which requires Vista, W7 or Server 2008. This is why you get the operating system error message.
  

• Nice tool.....i'm surely gonna use this tool......
  
  thnx a lot...!!
  

• I will use it as soon as i can.
  

• I also get the "Your system is not supported" message on XP SP3. The installer does open though but I don't see any option to select the SEO toolkit.
  

• Never can understand why it "works with any server"!???
  It should be standalone!
  And, despite it collects decent amount of helpful information, usability of this thing is pretty low. Problem descriptions buried to deep.
  Though it may be improved in next version.
  

• This is very much like googles webmaster tools which has been around for quite a few years already. Regardless, good to know we have an alternative now.You post more about SEO or any else related about SEO
  
  Good post!!
  

• Good it is very much like googles webmaster tools which has been around for quite a few years already. Regardless, good to know we have an alternative now.
  you post more about SEO or any else related about SEO
  
  Nice Post!
  
  

• It won't install on my Windows XP Pro SP3 machine. "The product you are trying to install is not supported on your operating system. Click here for more information."
  

• The Microsoft Web Platform Installer that you downloaded and installed first is compatible with XP SP3. The SEO toolkit requires the IIS7 admin tool which requires Vista, W7 or Server 2008. This is why you get the operating system error message.
  

• wow...it looks very technical. but i'm going to try it out. thanks!
  

• You probably wouldn't want to run this on an Intranet site. Most Enterprise Intranet sites I've seen use HTTP GET for non-idempotant operations. So this toolkit will destroy data.
  

• The page for downloading the tool has all broken links and the web platform installer doesn't include the seo tool. Maybe that's why no one is using it.
  

• I could not get the file to download.
  

• yes this tool is great. everyone should give it a try and you wont be sorry for that.
  

• Great tool. It help our site a lot.
  Thanks.
  
  -------------------------------------
  Viettelco.com - cheap call to vietnam
  

• I installed the tool and am trying it right now. Seem to have some nice features. Smaller sites work fine, but I have problems with larger sites. Had to stop the tool via the task manager (Vista).
  
  For people having problems with installing: just choose the link of the Web Installer. Once downloaded just tick the checkbox of the toolkit (I had nothing else checked). No need to download the additional plugin.
  

• For people having problems with installing: just choose the link of the Web Installer. Once downloaded just tick the checkbox of the toolkit (I had nothing else checked). No need to download the additional plugin.
  

• Never hear about this toolkit, thank
  

• Just an idea: would it not be nice if this tool integrated with VS some?
  
  Especially errors like "multiple canonical formats" could be fixed with one push of the button (mostly). For some other problems you of course couldn't do more than jump to the right page, and select the relevant html. You could even integrate it into the 'Error List' pane, as a type of error besides error, warning and message.
  

• Great Tool!
  
  Thanks.
  

• great!i am new in SEO business and have small business but with this toolkit, the work has become so easier, after reading all your comments i was forced to try it once. thanks to all!
  

• Is there any available API on this toolkit?
  

• thanks a tons... downloading it right now and giving it a try