IIS Site Analysis is a tool within IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that can be used to analyze web sites with the purpose of optimizing the site's content, structure and URLs for search engine crawlers. In addition the tool can be used to discover and fix common problems in site content that negatively affect site's users experience. IIS Site Analysis includes a user interface for getting a comprehensive set of pre-built reports about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content specific problems found during analysis. IIS Site Analysis also supports building of custom queries against the data gathered during crawling.
Getting the Site Analysis Reports
To perform an analysis of your web site follow these steps:
- Launch IIS Manager
- Select the Server node or a site node in the tree view on the left and then choose "Site Analysis" feature.
- This will open the "Site Analysis" feature view which shows the list of all available analysis reports. If you have not run any analysis yet, then follow the steps described in the "Using IIS Site Analysis Web Crawler" to crawl your web site and create site analysis reports.
- Select and open a report from the list of available reports. This will open the summary page for the report, which you can use to get a snapshot of all the SEO violations and content problems found on your web site. Also, this page can be used as a starting point for getting to reports details.
Navigating Through the Site Analysis Reports
Summary Page
The site analysis summary page provides an overview of all the SEO related violations and problems found on your web site. In addition it contains a large set of pre-built reports about your site content and structure. Those reports can be accessed by using the navigation bars on the left side.
You can drill down into each individual item in the report by double-clicking on it, or by using the "View Group Details" command in the context menu. To open a particular report in a separate query page, use the "Open Query" command in the context menu:
Query Page
Opening any of the pre-built reports from the summary page will result in a new query page:
The query page is used to issue queries against the site analysis data, collected during crawling of a web site. In the screenshot above the query is used to get all the pages that reference images without specifying ALT attribute within the <img> HTML tag.
There is a set of actions that you can perform for each item within the query results pane. Those are accessible by using the context menu. The following actions can be performed:
View Details
This option will bring up a dialog box which can be used to get the detailed information about the item. Specifically you can see the violation details and suggested corrective action:
In addition, the actual response data is available if you need to do further investigations about causes of the reported violation. For example if you want to find out where in the response HTML this violation occurred, choose the "Content" tab. This will bring up the response content with the offending section of the markup highlighted.
View in Browser
This option will open the browser to make a request to the URL for the selected item.
View Pages Linking to This Page
This option will open a new query page with the query that will show all the pages on the site that reference the URL for the selected item. This kind of report is useful when you want to find out which pages may be affected if you change a particular URL on your site.
View Pages Linked by This Page
This option will open a new query page with the query that will show all the URLs that the HTML markup for the currently selected report item references. This kind of report can be used to get URLs for all the links and resources that the current page references.
View Violations on This Page
This option will open a new query page with the query that will show all the violation found on the page at the selected URL.
View in Hierarchy
This option will bring up a hierarchy view page which consist of the following parts:
- URLs of all pages that lead to the selected page
- URL of the selected page
- URLs of all the resources and pages referenced by the selected page
Double clicking on any item within the "Linking Pages" or "Linked Pages" list views, will make that item a selected page and will update the linked and linking pages views accordingly.
View Routes to This Page
This option will open a new page which will display the 5 shortest unique routes from the analysis start page to the currently selected page.
Each route is shown with the start page at the bottom, each subsequent page above, with the selected page on top. This report can be used to analyze how visitors can get to a particular page on your web site and if there any unnecessary pages that can be eliminated in order for users to more easily discover the selected page.
Word Analysis
Word Analysis feature can be used to get an idea about most commonly used words in a page content, which can be used as a keywords for accurately describing the web page content for search engines. To perform the word analysis:
- In any report, select the web page that you want to analyze;
- Double click on the row in the report to bring up the "Details" dialog;
- Choose the "Word Analysis" tab:
The most often used words within a page will be displayed, which can give you an idea about what keywords to choose for this page. In addition, the links that reference this page are listed at the bottom of the dialog. With that you can check whether the anchor text used within those links accurately describes the content of the page.
Summary
The Site Analysis within IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is a powerful and flexible tool that enables you to perform deep analysis of various aspects of your web site: from SEO recommendations compliance to content statistics, to paths analysis and keywords selection.
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