Firefox is a fully customizable, safe, open source, browser built by myriads of developers … but most people do not go past the basic functionality of web browsing. Firefox allows you to personalize your browser by adding tools related to your activity or domain of interest.
Some of these extensions are particularly useful for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes as they allow you to access useful SEO information located in one single place: your browser. 10 useful SEO add-ons for Firefox are:
1. Google Toolbar: This allows you to do a Google search from your browser and check PageRank in an instant.
2. Web Developer: Chris Pederick has developed an extension which adds a ‘Web Developer’ menu and a new Web Developer toolbar to the browser including various web development tools. The most useful SEO features are the image management (displays alt attributes), link information, anchor text display, title attributes, document size and various validation tools.
Find out more about the Web Developer tool by visiting Chris Pederick’s website.
3. NoDoFollow: This is a simple extension that highlights dofollow or nofollow links on a web page. When placed on a link, a nofollow tag instructs Google not to pass on PageRank value to the destination page. This tag is often used on blog comments, to avoid PageRank spillage. On the other hand, a dofollow link pass on some of this PageRage value, which is one of the many aspects considered when ranking a web page in search results pages.
This is important when you are building links on other websites (to increase your search engine rankings) and you need to determine whether a website uses a nofollow tag. Ideally, you want to obtain links from websites that will allow Google to pass on some of their PageRank value; as this will help in obtaining better search engine rankings. Read more about link building.
4. SEOBook RankChecker: This add-on allows you to check your website position in Google, Yahoo & Bing search engines. You can schedule tasks to look up any of your keyword lists daily, weekly, monthly, or at any duration you choose and you can even export your data as a CSV file.
If you add the graphs plug-in for Firefox Rank Checker – Site Rank Reporter, results can be displayed in a graphical representation for even easier analysis.
Find out more about the design team for SEO Book RankChecker.
5. SEO for Firefox: This is another add-on from SEOBook. This tool allows you to find important market research data about a website such as the number of incoming links, when it was last cached, .edu links, DMOZ links and so forth.
This add-on has three settings: auto to automatically collate the data whenever you search Google or Yahoo!, on-demand – the data will not be collated until you click on the associated link and hidden – if you do not find a particular data point useful you can remove that data point from the tool output.
It is recommended that you only turn this extension on when in use and turn it off when you’re casually searching on the web.
For a full list of features or to download the plug-in, visit SEOBook.
6. Google Global Search: Google Search results vary from where you search, from one country to another. This tool helps you search local Google Search Engines (using their different country specific domains) for a single search term. You will be able to view Google search results as they appear in different countries, cities, regions, post codes and IP addresses. It is very useful to see your website rankings as they appear to local searchers.
7. Show IP: This plug-in reveals the IP address of the current page, allows whois and IP tracking. The IP address of every web page that you visit is prominently displayed in Firefox’s status bar. Colour coding allows you to display IPv4 and IPv6 differently, and the style of all IPv4 addresses can be customized.
8. SEOQuake: This is a great search engine optimization tool and is ideal for competitor analysis. It provides information on page ranking, the number of pages indexed by Google, the number of backlinks as discovered by Yahoo Site Explorer and so forth.
Visit SEOQuake for a full list of features.
9. Advanced Dork: This add-on gives you quick access to the entire list of Google search operators on your search result pages. Highlight a word or phrase, right-click and choose one of six provided Advanced Google Operators (intitle: inurl: intext: site: ext: and filetype). A Google search page then opens in a new tab, where the results contained in the search include the highlighted text inside the chosen Advanced Google Operator.
10. PageSpeed: You should never underestimate how important it is to have a fast and responsive site so visitors don’t have to wait to access the information they require. This plugin evaluates the performance of web pages, displays problems that need to be addressed and provides suggestions on how to maximize the overall speed of the website. As well as making your website faster and keeping Internet users engaged with your website, you will reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs.
Find out more about the PageSpeed add-on.
There are thousands of add-ons in the marketplace but these SEO tools will give you an edge over your competitors by helping you streamline your SEO processes and increase productivity without having to run dedicated software, open several tabs or windows in your Firefox browser.
