Top SEO Firefox Add-Ons You Probably Don’t Know About

Another Firefox Add-on List… You Don’t Say?

One of the great things about browsers like Firefox and Chrome are their ability to improve and customize your web browsing experience through add-ons and extensions. The only downside to these browser extensions are that there are hundreds of new ones created everyday, so it can be very time consuming trying to separate the good, from the bad and ugly.

If you are in any way involved in the search engine optimization industry, then you know these browser extensions can mean saving hours when evaluating websites or search engine results.

Although you also know that you can waste hours trying new extensions and never fully taking advantage of their full potential. Below I have identified the top Firefox add-ons, complete with their functionality and ways of use, that have been demonstrably helpful in my SEO career, yet don’t seem to get the visibility as their big brother counter parts.

On-Page SEO Firefox Add-Ons

SEO Doctor – Brought to you by Prelovac Media, this add-on has 2 great features to help you improve your on-page SEO: SEO Score and Links. SEO Score reviews and scores your page based on accepted SEO best practices. Each score is partnered with an explanation and tips on how to improve the score, making it a great tool for the inexperienced optimizer. Some of these factors include: META tags, image information, load time, page rank flow, links and more. The Links feature on this addon helps you identify all inbound and outbound links on the specific page showing you where most of your link value is going.

Another great thing about this add-on is the one-click access to popular SEO tools like Who.IS, Pingdom, Quantcast, Ispionage and a whole ton of other sites I am just starting to dive into.  Basically the sky is the limit with this add-on; just try not to get sucked into the black-hole of endless data. SEO requires action, not just analysis.

Web Developer  – While this plugin is identified as a web developer plugin, many SEO experts find this add-on to be very helpful. Specifically, the functions that I find to be very helpful with on-page optimization are:

• CSS:  Disable CSS – This will allow you to see the page as a search engine see it. Typically browsers have this functionality, but Web Developer lets clarify which part of the CSS you would like to disable
• Images: I specifically find that the “View Image Information” option is extremely helpful for getting a full run down on all of the images found on the site, but this tool will also identify any broken images on the page, display all ALT attributes without leaving the page, hide images and more.
• Information: Similar to the popular add-on Firebug, this tool will allow you to inspect specific elements of your web page. If you find Firebug a little daunting, I would try this add-on. The way Web Developer lays out the element information is a lot cleaner and much easier to digest if you are not a professional web developer. Other nice features include “Display Title Attributes”, “View META Tag Information”, “View Javascript” and my favorite, “View Document Outline” This will give you a full run down of the page headers and which ones are missing or over used.
• Miscellaneous: Similar to Firebug, this tool will let you edit the HTML of your page locally. Why? If you want to make a change to your web page, but want to try out a couple of different options, try this tool to test the options. Presto! You no longer have to waste time going back-and-forth with the developer with constant tweaks.
• Tools: If you care about W3C validation, this tool will streamline this process, by giving you the ability to validate the HTML, CSS, Feed, Links, etc. without ever having to leave the page.

These are just some of the capabilities of Web Developer that I’ve found to be helpful with SEO. If you love this add-on for other SEO tasks please let me know in the comment section below.

Off-Page SEO Firefox Add-Ons

Most SEO professionals have heard of SEOBook and most articles that cover “Top SEO Plugins” recommend adding their extension to your browser, which is why I am not going to feature it here. While it is a great tool with great functionality, there are several others that are not as commonly featured but nevertheless great for SEO link building and website analysis.

Foxy SEO Tool  – This add-on has a collection of features that gives you one-click access to important SEO analytics and reports. Here are some of the features I find most beneficial:

• Get search engine data for your site from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask and Blekko. Depending on which search engine you focus on, this add-on will give you one-click access to your site backlinks, cache, related sites, indexed pages and more. This information is really helpful when analyzing your competitors’ sites or possible linking opportunities.
• Want to know how a competitor’s website was built? How about its audience-reach and profile? Or would just like a quick report on sites similar to the one you are evaluating? Check out the “Traffic” and “Profile” menus for answers to all of those questions and ones you never even thought to ask!
• The “Directories” and “Social Media” menus give you easy access to which major directories the site is featured in, as well as any social sharing information for the top social networking sites. This will be helpful when determining partnership blog sites or evaluating a competitor’s link building strategy.
• The “Network” and “Misc” menus will be a valuable tool for anyone who is a victim of negative SEO, such as content scraping or identifying ownership of sites that are sending low quality links to your site.  Get DNS info, WHO.IS information, IP Neighbors and even run a plagiarism report on Copyscape with one click.

Link Gopher – Want to quickly pull a page’s link profile? This tool gives you a quick and easy to read report on each of the links found on the page and which domains they are coming from. Looking for a specific link? Use the “Extract Links By Filter” option and type in the link or domain you are looking for.

Lazarus: Form Recovery – For all of you multi-taskers; you multi-browser, 20-tabs-open masters… this is your HOLY GRAIL. How many times have you answered a forum question or filled out a directory submission, hit “Submit” but because you spent too much time on the site you were logged out and all of your hard work – along with your sanity – is lost. You know the re-write is not going to be as good as the first attempt because you are annoyed, can’t remember it all and frankly your heart has just moved on. Whatever “Oh S#*%!” moments you’ve had because of this problem can now be eliminated with Lazarus. This tool saves any information you type into a form so that you may access it again whenever you need. That’s right, no more attempting to re-create the perfect outreach statement or opening up a separate doc to save a copy of your submissions “just in case” have officially ended.

SERPTrends SEO Extension – Want to keep track of changes made to SERP’s for some of your most important keywords? Maybe you are courting a particular keyword and would like to see how you are progressing without having to run a ranking report? Turn this extension on, run a search on the keyword and anytime you perform that search again, SERPTrends will show you if any website has moved up, down or is new to the page.