Search Optimization SEO

Turn Your Browser into an Optimized SEO Dashboard

Lets face it, there is a lot of information related to SEO that would be nice to just have on your browser as you visit any given page. Which links are nofollows, how many backlinks does a page have, how many pages does a site have indexed in Google, … Well luckily you can get all this information plus more.

The first thing you need to do is stop using internet explorer and start using Firefox. Then install two must have SEO plugins for Firefox. These are the Search Status and the SEO Quake plugins.

The Search Status plugin displays the current pages page rank as well as its sites alexa and compete ranks at the bottom right of the browser. Additionally it has a great feature where it will highlight any link on the current page that has used the rel=”nofollow” attribute and therefore does not pass juice.

This is nice, but my real favourite is the SEO Quake plugin. For any page you visit, it adds to the top of the page a number of statistics for the page including its page rank, how many yahoo backlinks it has, how many pages it has indexed in Google, its alexa rank, its registration date, how many delicious bookmarks it has and more. On top of that whenever you do a search in Google, Yahoo or MSN it will add all these statistics to every entry in the search result.

Consider how easy it is to assess the competition on a keyword when you get all this information for every entry on the front page just by doing a search. Take this one step further and use the search query link:www.compeditorsdomain.com in yahoo. This will return the pages that link to your competitors page. Add all the SEO Quake statistics to each of these entries in this search and you are very quickly getting a detailed picture of the strength of the backlinks the page has.

Personally I would be lost without these plugins, so if you’re starting to take an interest in SEO, do yourself a favour and try them out.