Andrew introduced a free SEO analytics tool released by Microsoft.

The tool is distributed via the Microsoft Web Platform and runs on Vista and Windows 7. [The SEO Toolkit is independent of other components- no IIS server install is required].

The tool parses as a search engine would, so can be used to examine sites built with any underlying platform (e.g. PHP, JSP, ASP, flat HTML, etc..) and will highlight a range of potential problems. It will analyse both locally hosted and publicly-released sites, so is useful for both development and audit.

It has three main features – site analysis, robots editor and sitemap editor.

It includes a powerful query engine and is extensible (in VB.NET or C#).

A very useful talk for me- this is a tool I’ve not encountered, but I could see it fitting very appropriately into my web development workflow.

Slides and talk are now up on the SuperMondays blog.

References: Andrew Westgarth, @apwestgarth, CarlosAg blog