Search Engine Optimization Toolkit For IIS

May 17, 2011 Leave a comment

I wanted to make MPMS Girls lax page more Search Engine friendly. I have never done any SEO ever so I jumped into Scott Allen’s article about SEO.

The first thing I did was to download the SEO toolkit to give myself a baseline. I launched the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit and pointed to www.mpmslax.com:

image

And by looking at the detail:

image

Working backwards:

Issue #7 has the blog redirect is throwing things off. Since we don’t even use that blog, I dropped it from the site.

Issue #6 – multiple <h1> was easily solved, I went to the offending .aspx page and dropped the <h1>. There is 1 <h1> and it is in the master page.

Issue #5 – canonical formats – I will deal with in a bit.

Issue #4 – not ALT attribute – all on the sponsor page – I just added a AlternateText attribute to the markup

Issue #3 – Title is empty – fixed (see below)

Issue #2 – Dropping the blog solves this problem

Issue #1 – Description is empty – fixed (See below)

The first couple of recommendations from Scott Allen and picked up by the SEO were easy. I added a title and some meta tags to my master page:

<head runat="server">
    <title>Mills Park Girls Lacrosse</title>
    <meta name="keywords" content="MPMS, Mills Park Middle School, Girls Lacrosse, Girls Lax" />
    <meta name="description" content="Mills Park Girls Lacrosse" />
    <link href="~/Styles/Site.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder ID="HeadContent" runat="server">
    </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</head>

I deployed the site and re-ran the SEO and got only the canonical formats error. Interestingly, I don’t see where the error is coming from. For example, I have these 2 errors:

The page with URL "http://www.mpmslax.com/girls/Public/ContactUs.aspx&quot; can also be accessed by using URL "http://www.mpmslax.com/girls/Public/Coaches.aspx&quot;.

The page with URL "http://www.mpmslax.com/girls/Public/Coaches.aspx&quot; can also be accessed by using URL "http://www.mpmslax.com/girls/Public/ContactUs.aspx&quot;.

But here is the relevant part of the site map:

        <siteMapNode url="~/Public/Coaches.aspx" title="Coaches"  description="MS Girls Lax Coaches"  />
        <siteMapNode url="~/Public/ContactUs.aspx" title="Contact Us"  description="MP Girls Lax Contact Us" />

That’s it – I have no idea where this error is coming from.

On a related canonical issue, I have the following urls for the site:

· www.mpmslax.com

· www.mpmslax.org

· www.mpmslacrosse.com

· www.mpmslacrosse.org

Since WInHost does not point at subdirectories, I am stuck unless I write a url redirect script. Taking the path of least resistance, I just popped in a basic MVC site to the main directory. People can then click on the link to go to the girls subdirectory.

I finally wrapped up URL Rewriter – it was already installed on WinHost. I can’t believe how easy it is – Just open the dialog and select the rule you want to enforce:

image

I picked all 3 SEO ones and called it a day. I am really impressed with the IIS add-ins – they really made my life easier.

Filed under IIS, IIS Tools