How crucial is considering SEO in planning a website? Microsoft’s ASP tools Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 will be equipped with basic SEO features when released later this year. According to the linked article, the vice president of Microsoft’s development division, Scott Gutherie, thinks that using SEO is important for all websites for better rankings and more traffic. Vision Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4 will have a basic SEO package, however, although more features are available through Microsoft’s separate SEO Toolkit.

The features included in Microsoft’s new ASP tools will be very basic, with keyword and description tags and URL routing included. But, as any SEO professional knows, this is a paltry amount of SEO. While description and 301 redirects are both important to optimizing any website, what about title tags, page, content, and reciprocal links? Perhaps these are included in the separate SEO Toolkit, but the SEO included with the ASP development programs is minimal, especially compared to offerings like Go Daddy’s Search Engine Visibility package.

Although adding some basic SEO can only help a website – and it should be incorporated from the development stage – thinking solely of keywords and descriptions doesn’t anticipate the issue of title tags. Ideally, title tags should be geared toward one keyword – two at the most – and with more than three incorporated into a category page title tag, the page isn’t really search engine friendly. Even though such tools by Microsoft should start developers thinking about SEO, more in-depth planning needs to be done. The main issue is devoting each page to a specific keyword or two at most and making sure all pages are equipped to handle not only description and keyword fields but also title tags and page content. After all, what’s a website without a title tag?