SEO Tools: Six Firefox 3 SEO Extensions

This is part two of a three part series highlighting free SEO tools. Part one discussed SEO Bookmarklets. In this post, we’ll look at six useful SEO add-ons for Firefox 3.

In no particular order, here are my favorite Firefox extensions for SEO and internet marketing:

1) SEO Link Analysis

SEO Link Analysis is a very handy extension that adds additional information to Yahoo! Site Explorer, Google Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Webmaster Portal.

Once you’ve installed the add-on, additional information will show up on the above-mentioned websites automatically. It will look something like this:

Here you can see:

• The PageRank of a backlink (if you notice a link with PR and no number listed after, the page is unranked).
• The anchor text (in quotes).
• Three different styles applied to this information. If black, the link exists and is followed. If orange with strikethrough, the link is nofollowed. If red, the link no longer exists.

This Firefox add-on makes it easy to quickly analyze your own backlinks or to look for potential backlink sources.

2) Social Media for Firefox

Social Media for Firefox is intended to help you become a social media power user. I use the extension to monitor the success of a given post or web page on four social bookmarking sites: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and delicious. You have the option of automatically querying the four sites, but I recommend leaving it on Manual.

If you want to see the data for a given page, just click on Manual and the add-on will query the social media sites.

(Edit: Forgot to mention, the number displayed for StumbleUpon isn’t thumb-ups, it’s the number of comments. Hopefully there will be a fix for this soon.)

3) RankChecker

RankChecker is an extension from SEOBook that lets you track and record a website’s search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo! and MS Live Search. You can:

• Create a list of keywords for a website and save as a preset list.
• Schedule automatic data collection for your keyword list (You can set the time and day interval, so a lot of flexibility here).
• Automatically store the collected data, which can be exported as .csv to the spreadsheet program of your choice.

The rankings are usually off by a few positions, which has to do with the way supplemental results show up with 100 results on a page (versus 10, which is the default number of results per page in Google). Still, it gives pretty accurate results and is easy to use. Since the data is stored to your hard drive (rather than a third-party server), it offers additional privacy. Definitely worth adding to your SEO toolkit.

4) SearchStatus

SearchStatus offers the following features:

• See the PageRank, Alexa and Compete rankings for the current web page. Compete rankings aren’t displayed by default. To activate, right click on SearchStatus icon, select Enable, then click on Compete (if unchecked).
• Highlight nofollow links on the current page.
• Link Report—popup box displaying link data for the current page, including total, external, internal and nofollowed links.
• Meta Tags—popup box showing meta data for the current page.
• View whois data (select your favorite of three sources under Options).
• Check for archived versions of the current page.
• View robots.txt file for the current website.
• Show Keyword Density—prompts you to select a keyword or key phrase to evaluate, then gives the keyword count, broken down by type (e.g. header tags, anchor text, bold).
• Highlight Keyword—highlights every instance of the entered keyword or key phrase.
• Show Indexed Pages—opens up three windows to show you the domain’s indexed pages for Google, Yahoo! and Live.
• Show Backward Links—allows you to see backlinks (all or only external) for the page or the entire domain in Google, Yahoo! and Live.

5) SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox is another great add-on from SEOBook. When you search with this extension enabled, you can view information about the web page directly in the SERPs, including:

• Domain age
• delicious bookmarks
• Yahoo backlinks, including those from .edu or .gov domains
• Technorati reference count
• Alexa and Compete rankings
• Link to Google Trends data
• Number of dmoz, BOTW and Yahoo! directory listings for the domain

6) SEOQuake

SEOQuake has inline search engine functionality that is similar to SEO for Firefox, with some additional features:

Adspy—if the current website has AdSense ads, you’ll see yellow highlighted text that looks like this:



If the site has multiple domains with Analytics installed, you’ll see this at the bottom of the SEOQuake sidebar:



SEOQuake’s sidebar enables you to view the information for the current page, rather than just in the SERPs.

I use this information to determine whether a site is trying to manipulate the search algorithms (useful if you’re vetting an outbound link or backlink). For instance, if a given site has 500 other websites associated with its AdSense ID, they may be duplicating content or using spammy affiliate SEO practices. Creating quality content for 500 websites is no small task.

Next SEO tools post

In my next post, I’ll point out some great website-based, free SEO tools. Stay tuned!