How To Install and Use IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit (IIS 7.0)

We think the IIS Toolkit is absolutely awesome!

This post will provide a step by step guide on how to install the powerful IIS 7.0 toolkit from Microsoft, and show you some of the many cool features which can open up a whole new world for extracting information from a website (we are talking about a Xenu link sleuth beater here!).

Please note: IIS 7.0 is only compatible with Windows Vista or Windows 7

The program is quite simple to install but it certainly isn’t one of the most obvious, and when you need a helpful guide there isn’t much about, so here’s something to help get you started…
1. Install Web Platform Installer 2.0

By downloading and installing the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, the set up process of IIS Toolkit becomes a lot easier, so this is a good starting point.
2. Install ‘Search Engine Optimization Toolkit’

Once the web platform installer has downloaded and installed, navigate over to the Microsoft SEO Toolkit page and click on ‘install using web platform installer’ in the download extension box in the right hand column:



Or alternatively here is a direct download and install link for IIS toolkit.

Once the download has begun, the Microsoft web platform installer will take care of the rest and install the required components to set up IIS Toolkit on your computer.
3. Activating IIS Toolkit

Now this is the section which isn’t that clear, once the download and installation process has been completed, on the majority of occasions (unless you are one of the lucky few – if so, then IIS toolkit will appear within ‘All programs > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit’ ready to use) you will need to active the software.

To do this, perform a search on your computer for ‘Turn windows features on or off’, or go to ‘Start > Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off)’



Once located a dialog box will be displayed, and under ‘Internet Information Services > World Wide Web Services’ double check that the check boxes have all been selected (see below screenshot for further guidance).



Once selected hit ‘ok’, and you are ready to launch IIS Toolkit.

Go to: Start > All Programs > IIS 7.0 Extensions > Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit 1.0
Using Microsoft’s IIS Toolkit

Now it’s time to let the fun begin. Once you have opened the program click on the ‘create a new analysis’ link underneath ‘Site Analysis’, and add in the details of the website you are looking to examine:



Clicking ‘ok’ will start the site crawl.

If you have used Xenu link sleuth you will immediately notice how much quicker and cleaner it is to crawl a website. Once the crawl has been completed you will be presented with a report overview with an indicator on the number of links crawled and errors encountered:



You can take a look in a lot more detail at the errors encountered within the violations tab (*cringes at the thought of posting this* If anyone asks it is not for seogadget!):



The summary provides a fairly detailed analysis of the types of errors (or potential errors) encountered and the number of occurrences of each type of error.

The Violations section also provides details on:
Pages with the most errors
Error levels picked up (number of errors, warnings and information)
Categorises the errors (SEO, content, web mark up etc)

But the IIS Toolkit analysis doesn’t finish there, content, performance and links sections all contain their own extensive report data. Here are some bullet points summarizing these 3 sections of IIS toolkit:
Content
Host summary
Directory summary
Content types summary
Status code summary
External links
Duplicate files
Duplicate titles, descriptions and keywords
Duplicate keywords
404 errors
Large content areas
Broken links by page
Performance
Slow pages
Slow pages by directory
Slow pages by content type
Pages with many resources
Links
Pages with most links
Most linked pages
Redirects
Links blocked by robots.txt
Internet protocols
Link depth

You can then export all of this data into a single Excel file where you can hone in even further on the data, and Richard’s post last week on finding orphaned pages from your sitemap.xml using IIS toolkit is just one example on how to use this powerful piece of kit.

Now I have always been a Xenu link sleuth fan, but after using IIS SEO toolkit, let’s just say ‘times they are a-changing’.