Search engine algorithms have become sophisticated over the years and some changes can have great impact on a website’s visibility in the search engines. Most SEO tools assist the webmaster in this regard by analyzing the contents of the website and relevant ranking factors to propose improvements to influence a website’s rankings in the search engines.

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer which can be downloaded from the Microsoft homepage. The core components of the Web Platform installer will be installed with the SEO Toolkit.

The Search Engine Optimization Toolkit can be found in the What’s New section of the installer.

A new analysis can be started once the installation has been finished. The webmaster needs to supply a project name and url of the website. The advanced settings limit the number of urls and download size per url as well as other settings like ignoring nofollow and noindex attributes, authentication or external link definitions.

The number of urls and the performance of the local Internet connection and that of the web server influence the time it takes to retrieve the data and generate the report. The report concentrates on onpage factors of the website. It is divided into the five sections Summary, Violations, Content, Performance and Links.

Summary:

Displays a basic summary that includes the url, start and end date, downloaded items, links and violations. This summary seems to be buggy as it reported back 0 links and violations which did not correspond with the data found in the violations and links section of the report.

Violations:

Violations are divided into warnings, information and errors. The violation summary lists all violation categories, their level and count. Typical violations are page titles that are to long, broken hyperlinks or mission descriptions. Some of the violations that are listed on the page are not seen as such by members of the SEO community. It is therefor recommended to research the entries before starting to make changes to the website. Violations can be listed in the summary view or sorted by most violations, by category or violation level.

A double-click on an entry will load the urls where those violations have been found.

This opens a window with powerful information about urls with violations. The tabbed interface provides detailed information about the page (content length, title, meta tags or url), the violation type and recommended actions, page header information, content (source or website), word analysis (total words, unique words, two words, three words, text), incoming (from the same domain) and outgoing links and additional violations found on that specific page.

Another interesting option is to display the routs to the specific pages. This will list the top 5 routes that visitors can take to reach that specific page on the website.

Content:

The content category lists various content related information about the analyzed website including duplicate files, titles, descriptions, keywords as well as large content, content that has not been found or pages with broken links.

Performance:

Lists the performance of the pages that have been crawled by the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. This category lists slow pages which can be sorted by directory, content type and pages with many resources.

Links:

Provides a detailed analysis of the links found on the pages that have been analyzed. It provides an overview of the pages with the most links, the pages that are linked the most, redirects, links that are blocked by robots.txt, links by protocol and link depth.

Export options

The SEO toolkit will also allow you to export your results as CSV files which may be loaded and viewed in Excel or other spreadsheet software. For an example of this, take a look at the ‘Violation Categories’ tab. You’ll see each of your violation categories listed. Here you can see my site showing 2146 various violations!

You can generate a CSV file with details of the Violation using the ‘Report’ button at the top of the screen. This selection will offer a comprehensive report if you choose “Export all violations”. Once data is in a CSV file, you can manipulate and resave as an Excel file.

If you prefer to customize the fields that are reported, you can do this using the Query Engine use the which is available by pressing the ‘Query’ button at the top of the report, and selecting ‘New Violations Query’.

(via Web Platform Blog)

Verdict:

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit offers a detailed analysis of a website’s onpage SEO factors. Errors that are reported by the tool should be fixed by the webmaster as soon as possible. Violations or warnings on the other hand need to be analyzed more carefully to avoid over-optimizing a website.

Professional webmasters use search engine optimization software to check the search engine position of their keywords. Those software applications provide a history, comparison and access to hundreds of other information that can all be useful in determining why a website is ranking the way it is.

Low budget webmasters have to either rely on manual searches which is so time consuming that one could spend a whole day checking a few dozen keywords in the major search engines.

That’s where SERPs Finder comes into play. The basic SEO tool can check the search engine position of a given keyword in the major three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live).

It checks the first hundred results only for Google who like to temporarily ban an IP from their search engine if excessive use has been detected. The other two search engines are checked for the first 1000 results.

It is only possible to check the results in one search engine at a time. The user will be notified if the website is found in the results and the search engine position checker will load that search result’s page in the default browser.

SERP’s Finder is no tool for webmasters who want to check hundreds of keywords but it is great for small websites with only a few keywords.