Improve Your Web Site with a Free SEO Tool from Microsoft

You don't have to be a developer, tech geek, or even a Webmaster to know that SEO -- search engine optimization -- is a critical part of making your Web site a success. If you operate a Web site or even just a blog, making the site's various pages play well with Google will help you get visitors. Easier said than done, though, right? Who understands SEO?

Well, Microsoft does, apparently, and they've released a free utility you can use to quickly get a detailed SEO analysis of any Web site.

That's right -- another free goodie from Redmond. The SEO Toolkit analyzes your site and gives you a detailed report on how you can improve its search engine effectiveness. The report is in plain English -- it not only tells you what's wrong (you don't have an ALT tag on your images, for example), but why fixing it is important to Google and other search engines.

There's an instructive video on the SEO Toolkit Web site, but don't worry about the techno-babble. The narrator starts by telling you how this program plugs into IIS and it's awesome for Web developers. I'm sure that's true, but it's also true that you don't have to have the slightest idea what IIS stands for to use the SEO Toolkit.

It took the SEO Toolkit about 3 minutes to find about 500 SEO violations on my personal blog, which include broken links, art without ALT tags, over-long titles, and missing titles. The next question: Do I have the ambition to fix everything?