Microsoft Releases SEO Toolkit

By Doug Caverly – Mon, 04/12/2010 -

Offers small businesses help ranking on Bing, Yahoo, and Google

Even if you’ve already accepted the importance of SEO, think hard for a moment: when was the last time you clicked past the first page of search results?  Odds are, your answer confirms the need for optimization, and Microsoft wants to help with an SEO toolkit.

Microsoft LogoA post on the Small Business Blog from Microsoft announced this morning, “Microsoft has released a free SEO toolkit that can help you improve how search engines see, index and point to your site. . . .  [I]t processes your site in a similar manner and provides a report of the items and potential solutions to optimize a site’s organic search results (regardless of search engine).”

That’s a pretty nice offer.  The lack of a price is always a great starting point, of course, and it’s also helpful that the toolkit is supposed to provide more than Bing-related suggestions.

Small business owners shouldn’t stand to lose much more than a bit of time by trying Microsoft’s SEO toolkit, then.  Which is a pretty reasonable risk given how rare it is for people to click past the first page of search results (or even scroll down a little ways).

One last semi-endorsement: the toolkit is the most popular offering on the Bing Toolbox site.