Importance of SEO and the IIS

SEO Toolkit

 This session will help you understand the basics of Search

Engine Optimization(SEO) and the usage of the IIS SEO
Toolkit to optimize your websites.

By Sandeep Aparajit
sandeep@aparajit.co.in

Home | Blog | Photography | Puzzles

What is a Search Engine?
 A Web search engine is a tool designed to search for
information on the World Wide Web. The search results are
usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits.
The information may consist of web pages, images,
information and other types of files.

 Web search engines work by storing information about

many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW
itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler
(sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web
browser which follows every link it sees. Exclusions can be
made by the use of robots.txt.

 The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine

how it should be indexed (for example, words are
extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields
called meta tags).
Web site structure
Root folder for the website

Folders and files in the web site

Web.config file for the web site

Robots.txt is a file used to

restrict search engine from
indexing the site pages
Sitemap provides the web
site’s map to the search
engine. Which makes it easy
to crawl the pages
Importance of robots.txt and Meta
tags
 robots.txt is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders
and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website
which is otherwise publicly viewable.
 Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and
archive web sites.
User-agent: * User-agent: *
 Robots.txt Sample Disallow: Disallow: /

 Meta elements are HTML elements used to provide structured

metadata about a Web page. They are represented by <meta/>
tag.
 Following meta elements are important from SEO perspective:
 Title: <title>Sandeep Aparajit’s Blog</title>
 Description: <meta name="description" content="Puzzles and Brain
Teasers to increase your analytical skills." />
 Keywords: <meta name="keywords" content="brain, puzzles, teasers,
increase brain power" />
 Robots: <meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />

 The Site Map is used to provide the website map to the search
engines . The sitemap includes URLs’ in that website. It has
various attributes to govern URL priority and change frequency.
It is not mandatory to use an XML file, instead you can use an
aspx page which will render XML sitemap.
What is Search Engine
Optimization (SEO)?
 Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of
improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site
from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or
"algorithmic") search results.

 Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results

list, the more visitors it will receive from the search
engine. People tend to click the links that appear at the
top of the search result.

 SEO may target different kinds of search, including image

search, local search etc.

 Search Engine Optimization plays an important role in

online marketing.
SEO Through Business
Perspective (Online Marketing)
 In past few years, online marketing has played a key role in
business strategy

 The success of online marketing completely depends on the

number of visits made to your website and the length & depth
of those visits

 Approx. 90% of users visit the site via a search engine

 A typical user has a tendency to click top 10 search results

from the search engine result page. Thus it becomes very
important to list your website in top few search results

 SEO plays a key role in increasing the traffic to your website.

Following the SEO rules will make your website search engine
friendly and at the same time popular.
Factors affecting SEO
 How does a search engine see your page?
 Robots.txt
 Always mention the allowed and disallowed elements in the robots.txt. This
gives a fare idea to the search engine as to what it’s scope is. Also it helps
you to protect your admin related files from getting indexed
 Meta Tags
 Provide a short but highly meaningful Title. Do NOT exceed 60 character
for the title tag.
 Provide a meaningful description in the description meta tag. Description
should provide a brief meaningful description/text as to what this page/site
is going to provide. Avoid duplicating the description on the pages, since
each page is intended to provide something different. Max recommended
length of 160 words including spaces.
 Provide an extensive set of Keywords in the keywords meta tag. Max 5-10
keywords are recommended. Use the keywords that are often used in that
page.
 There are many other meta tags that you can provide such as Author etc,
but these are not much relevant to search engines.
 Sitemaps
 Provide an XML sitemap for the web site. The sitemap should be well
structured with respect to priority, change frequency etc.
 Alt attributes
 Always give a meaningful description in the alt attribute.
 Use of keywords in your article
 Have even distribution of keywords across the web site
 Do NOT use the keywords excessively
 …contd
 Structure and organize your code
 Keep your code in a structured way
 Do not leave HTML tags open. E.g. <img src=“ABC.jpg”>
 Do not have broken hyperlinks
 Always have a meaningful hyperlink text. Do not use text like- You can find the
source code here. The word “here” is very generic and does not convey the
information about what that link is going to provide.
 Do not have large amount of inline script code
 Canonicalize to ensure that the content of a page is only exposed as a unique
URI. Manage canonical links properly using the <link rel="canonical"
href="http://example.com/page.html"/> tag.
 Use User Friendly URLs’ in the website. Instead of using
http://example.com/products.aspx?pid=3194M use
http://example.com/products/Nokia_N94.aspx
 Remember search engines DO NOT actually view your pages on UI, but they
use a text ONLY browser (like Lynx) to view and interpret your web pages. So a
clean and meaningful code will have a positive impact on the search engine
 Use DIV tags instead of TABLE tags as far as possible– this also
helps in reducing the web page loading time.
 Target a high Page Rank in case of Google( Page Rank is the
Google’s view of importance of the page. Incoming links to your
site is one of the factors affecting page rank)
 Stick to the topic on your web page. For example, don’t add an
article on “C# algorithms” and “Bollywood buzz” on the same
page.
 Most important – the search engine should feel that your content
is useful.
The IIS SEO Toolkit
 The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit makes it
easy to analyze and assess how search engine friendly
your web-site is.  It pinpoints SEO violations, and
provides instructions on how to fix them.

 You can analyze the existing online sites and also the
sites that in development.

 Link:
 Download IIS SEO Toolkit
 IIS Administration Pack

 You can find the detailed usage information on the IIS

SEO toolkit at ScottGu’s Blog.

 It becomes very easy to analyze the websites using the

IIS SEO toolkit.
SEO Tips
 Can I block the IIS SEO Toolkit (iisbot) from crawling my
website?
 Yes. We can block iisbot from crawling my website using
robots.txt as shown below:
 User-Agent: iisbot
 Disallow: /

 You can use the online webmaster tools provided by

various search engines:
 Google’s Webmaster
 Yahoo’s Site Explorer
 Microsoft’s Bing Webmaster

 These tools will give you statistics about how many

pages are indexed, are there any issues in your site,
what is the crawl rate etc.
 Thank You!

You can mail you feedback

at sandeep@aparajit.co.in