If you haven't tried out the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit to analyze your websites for SEO opportunities it can be a worthwhile process.
I used the IIS SEO toolkit to analyze a legacy 10+ year old website on the Internet and the SEO Toolkit reported the following errors:
Anytime you see hundreds and thousands of warnings, errors, and performance comments in one of these site analysis reports it can freak you out a bit. Don't despair as the report really over exaggerates a problem that is not really that bad.
Search Engines are a Forgiving Bunch
Truth is, there are thousands of websites on the Internet that consist of incorrectly formed HTML, broken links, multiple redirects, poorly created titles and meta tags, missing header tags, non-conform to new standards, etc. and enjoy wonderful SEO. Now this isn't something I would brag about and ignore, but there is IMHO way too much hype and hysteria spread by various companies to get you to pay for their expensive SEO services.
Most of the websites on the Internet were built at a time when there were no sophisticated tools, knowledge, and standards we have today that these SEO Site Analysis tools use to analyze your website and recommend changes. If you run the IIS SEO Site Analysis Module against your website and see a huge number of violations as you see on the report above, don't take it personally and don't think your website stinks. Search engines are a pretty forgiving bunch and do a pretty darn good job indexing your website despite these problems. Many website owners with thousands of violations are enjoying great SEO Positioning.
Many Times IIS SEO Toolkit Violations are Easy to Fix
When you start analyzing the SEO violations you will notice that the same violation is actually “duplicated” because it comes from a common header, sidebar, footer or other area shared by many of the pages. Fixing one problem could actually knock off a hundred or more violations from the report.
This is especially true if you are using the same dynamic page to serve content across a number of different URL's. One can literally wipe out several thousand violations by closing an improperly closed div tag, for example, on a single dynamic page that serves up content for several thousand URL's.
Some IIS SEO Toolkit Violations Can Be Ignored
When I was analyzing another website I noticed some broken links that were valid and was wondering why they were indeed reported as broken. Turns out those websites happened to be down for some reason during the time of site analysis, but in general are typically up and running fine.
Some of the violations are more guidelines than anything and quite frankly aren't really going to hurt your SEO indexing and positioning. However, as guidelines, they are wortwhile considering as you add additional content going forward.
Conclusion
I think the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit ( as well as other tools ) are indeed excellent at analyzing your website and helping you fix and notice errors. However, don't get too worked up if they throw a lot of violations and recommendations at you. Search engines are pretty forgiving and pretty smart at indexing your websites and many older and not-so-optimized websites enjoy wonder SEO positioning. Some problems can be fxed pretty easily and others are more of a guideline that you can quite frankly ignore for content done in the past.
That being said, the IIS SEO Toolkit gives you a really nice report and some guidelines that can help fix a lot of warnings and errors rather quickly to make sure your website is running at optimum search engine friendliness :)
Hope this helps.
David Hayden
Search Engine Optmization ( SEO ) Tutorials