Microsoft which has been known to make things simpler for the common user like in the case of the PC – this time it has done so for SEO. With the plethora of tools claiming to be better than the other Microsoft has gone ahead and introduced a free tool that open the doors to webmasters. There’s growing need for a free search engine optimization toolkit which is tailored to all the major search engines namely Bing, Yahoo and Google. Wasting no time, Microsoft’s SEO Toolkit is one such tool which has a lot to offer at one go allowing webmasters and web administrators to adapt their sites not just to Bing, but also to Google and Yahoo.

The IIS SEO Toolkit can be used to analyze web sites to serve to purpose of optimizing sites content, structure and URLs for search engine crawlers. The tool focuses on discovery and fixing of problems related to web-sites and their optimization with regards to SEO. The toolkit includes a web crawler which crawls publicly available site links and resources which are needed or viewed for site analysis.
“The free SEO Toolkit analyzer helps you increase traffic and visitors to your site, and as a result can increase the revenue you directly or indirectly make through your website,” notes Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, Microsoft.

Continue reading »

It’s been a while since my last posting and a lot has happened in the marketing world. I figured that with the recent spate of interesting developments, the timing would be right to post my next blog update. Here are some of the newsworthy developments in the blogosphere and my personal views on them…

Google and China – Starting off with the news that’s been dominating all the RSS feeds and blog posts…Will they or won’t they? Will Google finally take a stand and walk out of a booming market or will they bow down to the higher powers. While Google in the past had agreed to censor search results in accordance with government policies in China, it is no longer willing to do so. Miffed at the reports about hacking of personal email accounts of human rights activist, Google threatened to take its business out of the China market. However, as I write, the analysts are still speculating on what will be the outcome of this tug-of-war. While on one end, Google is talking about the right to free information and privacy laws, on the other end China is questioning the double standards by Google. Several cyber-security experts claim that “e-mail hacker had obtained the e-mail information by accessing Google’s own internal intercept system - a program designed to enable Google to collect user information in response to US government demands.” While I firmly believe in freedom of speech and information, I also wish that all the facts come out in the open before we make any judgments on this issue.. More details on this here. Also read Google’s official statement here

Continue reading »