These days, we are fortunate to have a huge variety of SEO tools to make our work easier & more efficient. Since so many of these tools are free, however, it is easy to clutter up your browser with many more tools than you actually need. I recently decided to clean up Firefox on my machines, which was overloaded with so many tools I often found myself opening and closing the toolbars all day long. They had become so cluttered with SEO tools that I was not able to get a decent view of a web page when they were opened, especially on my laptops. I feel a little less crazy and a bit more efficient now that I have lightened up Firefox’s SEO tool belt. And Firefox is even running a bit faster, which is an added bonus.
Here’s what I kept in my SEO tool belt for the Firefox browser:
SEO for Firefox
When you turn this baby on and do a search query, you can instantly pull up a ton of metrics on each site listed in the SERPS — right there in the SERPS. The data you can view for each listing simultaneously includes Google PageRank, site age, total number of backlinks according to Yahoo, total number of .edu and .gov links, number of Del.icio.us bookmarks, Alexa ranking, number of Bloglines subscriptions, how many pages are indexed in Google, whether or not a site is listed in the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ, and a link to WhoIs data. You can also view number of Diggs, stumbles, tweets, Technorati mentions, a link to Google Trends data as well as Majestic SEO, Wikipedia mentions, Best of the Web inclusion, and rankings in Yahoo and Google.
Another great feature of SEO for Firefox is its X-ray tool, which allows you to see if a page has basic on-page SEO components in place such as titles, h1 tags, meta descriptions, and alt-image text. It also has a useful option to highlight nofollow links (see below).
The only thing that I don’t like about SEO for Firefox is that you now have to register with SEOBook in order to download it. And each time you download it onto a new machine, you must go to SEOBook and ask them to email you a link to the download. Still, with all the features you get get (for free, at that), it’s worth the bit of extra trouble.
Firebug, Yahoo! YSlow & Google Page Speed
I use Firebug to inspect source code without having to open a new window and diagnose scripting errors. It also has several great add-ons. The ones I have decided to keep are Yahoo! YSlow and Google Page Speed, which, as their names imply, measure page load speed. But what’s really awesome about these tools is that they not only tell you how fast your page loads, but they grade it based on how well it is optimized for loading and give you suggestions for improving your page load time (e.g., enabling compression).
You might be wondering why I decided to keep two different tools for measuring page speed in my SEO tool kit. The answer is, frankly, I couldn’t choose which one to give the boot. They basically do the same thing, but each one gives slightly different results and has a few unique features. It also is interesting when the results are pretty far apart, such as the tests I recently ran for The Huffington Post’s home page (see below).
YSlow gave The Huff Post a grade of “E” due to too many http requests, lack of a content delivery network, missing expires headers, non-compressed pages, too many DNS lookups, and multiple javascript and CSS files. YSlow did give The Huff high points for calling CSS from the top of the page and javascript from the bottom, avoiding URL redirects, making ajax cacheable, avoiding 404s, using cookie-free domains, and using GET for ajax requests.
YSlow gave The Huff a much higher score, 79 out of 100. Note that YSlow gave The Huff points for some of the same data points that Google Pagespeed docked points for. This is why I need both tools!
Aside from SEO, I also use Firebug frequently for design-related purposes such as previewing CSS changes in Firefox. I also do this for Chrome. Firebug for Chrome isn’t quite as robust as the Firefox version, but is still an amazing tool.
mozBar
I use the paid version of SEOmoz’s mozBar. If you want to try it out, however, the free version is pretty darn useful as well. Here’s what the mozBar toolbar looks like on my Firefox for Mac:
Here’s closeup shot of the most helpful features on the toolbar:
The mozBar gives me quick access to a URL’s Page Authority, Domain Authority, mozRank for the page, mozTrust for the domain, and the number of URLs and domains linking to the URL. And if I want in-depth information, there is a handy link on the toolbar that will pull up more Linkscape metrics for me. There are also shortcuts to the other tools I often access at SEOmoz, including Trifecta, Open Site Explorer, and the Keyword Difficulty Tool, as well as the Pro Q&A forum where I go when I cannot find a solution to my SEO debacle anywhere else. There are also a lot of other shortcuts that I don’t use, such as one to SEOmoz videos. If I want to see a video, I just pop on over to the SEOmoz site. For some reason, though, having shortcuts to my favorite SEOmoz tools is quite useful.
Some other groovy things the mozBar does is show me on-page SEO factors without having to dig into the source code, and evaluate the link profiles of all the URLs in a SERP. There is also a three-part page overlay feature (see below).
That’s it, folks. These are the SEO tools I have at my fingertips at all times. Streamlining my Firefox plugins has made them even more accessible than they were before when the browser was cluttered by a lot of tools I rarely used.
What about you, is your SEO tool belt sagging a bit? Or have you recently given it a makeover? I’d love to hear what SEO tools are most essential to your daily work.
