3 SEO Add-ons for Firefox
Jul
29
2009
Statistics suggest more users are switching away from the well-known traditional browsers such as the various iterations of Internet Explorer, and plumping for Firefox and to a smaller extent Google Chrome.
For power-users, Firefox is almost a given choice due to the huge catalogue of Add-ons available on the Mozilla site. Many of these add-ons can improve workflow, save time and give web developers, SEOs and other professionals the information they need right in the browser sidebar or context menus.
The following list of Firefox add-ons are useful for SEOs and accessibility junkies.
- SEOpen
SEOpen is a useful add-on which allows you to check Backlinks and Pages Indexed across Google, Yahoo and Bing. There are some additional options for Google, including a PageRank checker, Cached page checker and Related page search feature. SEOpen has several other tools, including a header checker, check robots.txt files, WHOIS lookup and HTML validator. In my opinion, there are other tools that are better or faster at finding certain information so I tend to use SEOpen for purely Backlink checking, HTML validation, and a lazy way to check a robots.txt file for a site. - Web Developer
The Web Developer toolbar is probably my favourite and most useful tool for SEO, Web Design and accessibility. If you setup Web Developer to run as a bar along the top of your browser you can easily enable/disable JavaScript, view your site devoid of CSS, remove all images and check alt text. This tool is a real time-saver. For SEO purposes it is useful to remove JavaScript then check your code to see that content is not missing. This tool can be used for accessibility purposes to see how navigable your site is with various features disabled (I usually disable images and JavaScript as a basic accessibility check). If you have read earlier posts on Brightscape, you will remember that we used the Web Developer toolbar to check the level of compression for CSS, JavaScript files and the use of mod_deflate to compress files. - SearchStatus
This simple add-on sits in the Firefox status bar and gives details on PageRank. It has various other options including highlighting ‘nofollow’ links, keyword density and meta data information. Most options are available by right-clicking on the icon in the status bar – making this a quick and useful tool. Many of the options in SearchStatus are similar to SEOpen, so some experimentation may highlight a winner over these two extensions (I’m putting this on my to-do list).
In a later post I will look at add-ons that can save web designers time by bringing various tools straight to the browser.
