Remarkablogger

Whether you’re running one blog or ten (or more!), SEO is important. If you’re in a competitive niche or you’re also making money online, SEO is even more important. It’s difficult to be serious in this game and not be using the Firefox web browser, because of its extensibility. Extensions are add-ons which provide additional functionality. There are thousands of Firefox extensions, but what I’ve done here is provide the results of hours of research into Firefox extensions that aid only in search engine optimization.

Now, you would think this has been done a million times before, but I was surprised at the lack of focus in the blog posts and articles I’ve seen. Someone would claim they had a list of SEO extensions, but it seemed they couldn’t stick to their topic, and included non-SEO extensions. Other articles that managed to stay on-topic only had about 4 to 7 SEO extensions listed. I have found 13 pure SEO-only Firefox extensions. I won’t call the list definitive or comprehensive (and if I’ve missed any, please add links in the comments), but I think it’s nearly comprehensive. There were one or two extensions I found that were just too old or seemed too dodgy to include.

Let me be sure to mention two important things:

1. I have not tested or used these, except a couple of them. This isn’t a review or instruction or recommendation of any kind.
2. You would never want all or even most of these. Check them out, look over their features, test them out for yourself one at a time, and keep just a couple that really bake your brownies. Some of them may even conflict with each other and cause problems. You’re on your own.

And with that, I release the hounds…

Google Toolbar

You knew this one was coming, didn’t you? Might as well get it out of the way. You may not think it delivers much other than PageRank info and backlinks, but you can add buttons to it. A lot of buttons. SEO buttons, in fact. can be a powerful SEO weapon.

SEOpen

SEOpen is used by right-clicking on web page. There is quite a bit of information you can access with it:

• Yahoo Backlinks
• Pages in Yahoo Index
• Google Backlinks
• Google Cache
• Pages in Google index
• Google Translate to English
• Google Related
• PageRank Check
• MSN Backlinks
• Pages in MSN Index
• Alexa Overview
• Alexa Traffic
• Alexa Related
• Alexa Backlinks
• “Mass Check” multiple sources at once
• Check DMOZ Inclusion
• Keyword Density
• Page Size Checker
• HTML Validator
• Server Header Viewer
• Wayback Machine
• Check robots.txt
• Whois Info

SEO Links Extension

With SEO Links Extension, you simply mouse over any link on a page get information in a tooltip.

Search Status

Search Status shows you Google PageRank info (without needing the Google Toolbar) and Alexa Rank info. You can right-click on these values to access even more data. One thing I really like about it is that it doesn’t have to be at the bottom of your browser window. You can also dock it at the top.

SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox comes from the venerable SEO Book guru Aaron Wall. He warns not to use this tool too much–use it only when doing research, not for casual surfing, as you could possibly get marked as a scraper. This tool is unique in that it shows SEO data points right in the SERPs! That is very, very cool. Here is a list of what it gathers:

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

It also places extra links at the top of the SERP for the following:

• Google Trends - shows historical search volume trends
• SEO Book Keyword Research Tool - cross references many popular keyword research tools
• Overture View Bid - shows Yahoo!’s top bid prices for a particular keyword
• Google Traffic Estimator - shows top bid estimates and click volume estimates associated with Google AdWords.
• Google Keyword Sandbox - Google’s keyword research tool

SeoQuake

SeoQuake is similar in general concept to SEO for Firefox, except with far more disturbing graphics on their website. They give the same warning: use it judiciously or risk getting banned. It is very sophisticated software, an extension with its own plugins for different SEO data tasks. Installation and configuration appears to be somewhat technical.

Customize Google

Customize Google allows to “rewrite” Google service behaviors in useful ways, enough of which have to do with SEO research that this tool belongs on the list. Here’s what it can do:

• Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you’re typing)
• Add links to competitors
• Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
• Removes image copying restrictions in Google Book Search
• Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
• Block Google Analytics cookies
• Hide the Gmail spam counter
• Make URL previews on sponsored links visible
• Add favicons in the web search results
• Remove ads
• Anonymize your Google userid
• Add a result counter in search result
• Filter spammy websites from search results
• Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
• Remove click tracking
• Add links from Google to your bookmark manager
• Use a fixed font for Gmail mail bodies
• Stream Google search result pages
• Sticky Google Preferences

RankQuest SEO Toolbar

The RankQuest SEO Toolbar is an amazingly thorough toolset.

Validation Tools

• Server Header
• Link Checker
• Code Cleaner
• Html Validator

Content Tools

• Lynx View
• Text Ratio
• Link Explorer
• Keyword Density Analyzer
• Keyword Density Compare
• Web Speed Report
• Meta Tools

Popularity Tools

• Keyword Finder
• Meta Tag Analyzer
• Meta Tag Generator

Link Popularity

• Search Engine Saturation
• Alexa Rank Comparison
• Search Engine Tools

SEM Tools

• Combo Result Viewer
• Google Search Tools
• Yahoo Search Tools
• MSN Search Tools
• Adwords Generator
• Duplicate Keyword Remover

Alexa

• Back Links
• Overview
• Traffic
• Related

Other Tools

• Site Map Generator
• Google Ads
• Site Report
• Whois

PageRank Status Extension

PageRank Status Extension doesn’t seem to do much, but sometimes simple is good.

Blueorganizer Extension for Firefox

Blueorganizer Extension for Firefox is another toolbar with a host of SEO capabilities:

• Google PR
• Alexa Rank
• PI Rank features
• Search Engine view
• whois
• Wayback lookup
• direct links to all the PPC engines, SEO Forums and other online tools

yExplore

yExplore is a Firefox extension that offers right-click insight into the Yahoo Site Explorer tool.

KGen

KGen retrieves keywords from a page and lets you know how many times they appear and their weight in the page.

Niche Watch

Niche Watch delivers:

• backlinks number
• indexed pages
• keyword occurrences
• page rank
• all in anchor
• all in title
• all in text rank for both domain and webpage information

This article covers the Third Key: Blog SEO. Better Blogging with Michael Martine focuses on Seven Keys to Better Blogging. If you found this post useful, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed.

Technorati Tags: SEO, SEO tools, SEO extensions, Firefox SEO extensions