Utilising Firefox to Drive Your SEO

January 11th, 2010 by Nick

Ask any web developer or SEO programmer their opinion on internet browsers and more often than not their favourite will always be Mozilla Firefox. Firefox has become a staple tool for any kind of web development or page analysis, and I’m going to take a look at what makes it so great and provide you with some add-ons which any Search Engine Optimisation programmer shouldn’t be without.

The first add-on I always choose following a Firefox install is SearchStatus, this is the perfect SEO tool which provides a whole manner of website data and analysis. It sits inconspicuously in the right hand side of your status bar, and once right clicked you are faced with a list of 15 options. The beauty of this is you can do so much with one tool and a couple of clicks, you can view keyword density, whois information, meta tags, internal and external link profile, and also PageRank display to name a few.

Secondly I would choose the Netcraft Toolbar add-on, this is a convenient toolbar more so from the SEO analysis perspective, as it displays information relating to domain age, hosting and Alexa rank on every site you visit. This gives you a visual insight into the foundations of a website, a major factor in the search engine ranking algorithms.

Another add-on that is used daily here at SEO Consult for competitor analysis is the SEO4Firefox software. This has been generated by the team at SEOBook and details site information within the Google search results page, allowing you to see numerical position, site PageRank, last cached and inbound link data. This is useful for judging the authority of top listed sites, however the one negative is it will slow your searching down considerably.

The final tool is more for the web development side of things, it’s called Firebug, and allows you to make live website changes to code. This is useful if you want to make a quick display change to see how it will look before moving live, testing colours, gauging height and width information etc.

In my opinion Firefox is the only browser option from a technical standpoint, but I foresee Google’s Chrome browser to be challenging in years to come, whilst Internet Explorer still lacks usability and frequently encounters display issues.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 11:59 am .

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2 Responses to “Utilising Firefox to Drive Your SEO”

Jamie Ludlow says:

January 11, 2010 at 2:53 pm

Thats right, these tools/add-ons are really of great help. I also use these tools myself. Thank you for posting this, I will talk about this on my blog. (http://www.decentreview.com)
Latha says:

January 13, 2010 at 11:31 am

Thanks for posting this. Very good information and YES firefox is my favorite too…

I mean I cannot dream of using any other browser, it has all the gizmos.
Have you looked at SEOQuake? Love it.
I think it’s similar to SearchStatus

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