SEO Tools: a Collection of SEO Bookmarklets

What Are Bookmarklets?

Bookmarklets are snippets of javascript code that add functionality to your web browser. Here are some great SEO-related bookmarklets, with an explanation of how you can use each one to make your SEO research easier.

Many of the functions are already built into one of the handful of SEO-related Firefox add-ons (I’ll add a list of my favorites shortly). A few of the benefits of SEO Bookmarklets:

• They work in most browsers (so if you can’t use Firefox, bookmarklets are a good option). These were tested in FF3, IE7 and Safari.
• Great when you just want a specific bit of information, as the results often load faster.

How to Use Bookmarklets

Click and drag any of the title links below to your bookmarks toolbar (it’s helpful to create a folder first). Or, right-click the links and save them as a bookmark.

SEO Bookmarklets

Alexa : Shows the current website’s Alexa ranking. The rankings are skewed toward websites that attract a high number of users with the Alexa toolbar (web developers, SEOs, etc.). However, Alexa is still helpful when comparing two sites within the same niche. Keep an eye out for resources (such as a blog or free tools) that might draw extra traffic so that you can interpret the data accurately.

AttentionMeter : Shows traffic data for the current domain from Compete, Quantcast and Alexa and related posts (by day) on Technorati. Use it to keep track of your own traffic and that of competitors.

Check Alt Text : Highlights images with missing alt text (dashed gray outline) or titles (solid green outline). Hover over the images for additional information. Image alt text is great both for search engine robots and users requiring accessibility, so it’s important to add descriptive alt text for every image.

delicious : Takes you to the delicious information for the current web page. If you aren’t familiar with delicious, it’s a social bookmarking site—people use it to find, share, and keep track of pages they like.

DomainTools : Provides information about the current website, including:

• Website title and meta description.
• Historical thumbnails of the website’s home page.
• Registrar, registrant and server information.
• SEO Score—rates website based on internal html optimization.
• If the site’s SEO Score is less than 100%, use the SEO Text Browser in the right column. This tool will offer one suggestion at a time for improving your website’s structure for SEO. Make the change, then visit again for the next suggestion.

Link Count : Provides the number of links on the current page. (Includes internal and external links.)

Link Type : Colorizes text links based on type. Useful for evaluating potential outbound links. It allows you to identify out-of-place outbound links, which could indicate a link exchange or paid link—these can cause the site to be designated a bad neighborhood website.

• Red is an internal link.
• Orange is a link to the current page.
• Blue is an external link.

Technorati : Takes you to the Technorati page for the current website. Shows authority rating (the number of inbound blog links) if the site is a blog and shows a list of blogs that have referenced the website. For those who aren’t familiar with Technorati, the website makes it possible to discover blogs within a certain niche and to search for news stories.

TouchGraph : Shows a Java-based visualization of the current website’s related pages on Google. You can also access the information by typing related:thedomain.com into the search box, but then it won’t be visualized and jiggly.

URLs as Link Text : Converts all text links to their URLs. Helpful for evaluating the outbound links on a website.

Validate CSS : Validates the CSS of the current web page. W3C.

Validate HTML : Validates the HTML of the current web page. Valid code makes it easier for robots to properly index your content and thus can have a positive effect on search engine ranking. W3C.

Verify Links : Checks the current domain’s links. Enables you to easily locate broken links, which can negatively impact search rankings. W3C.

View Meta : Displays all meta data for the current page. This bookmarklet makes it easy to verify the accuracy of meta data.

Wayback Machine : Searches Wayback Machine for archived versions of the current website. Helpful for competitor research.

Yahoo! Site Explorer : Lists indexed pages and backlinks for the current page or website (choose from the drop down menu above the results). Very useful for monitoring your own backlinks and also for researching new backlink sources.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Jesse’s Bookmarklets and SEOBook for creating these resources. Be sure to check out their websites, both offer great content.