The things that I look at first are essentials, like a page’s Pagerank or Alexarank. While they have lost much of their appeal in recent years, they still are helpful in getting a first impression of a site and a site’s progress over time. You simply know that something’s wrong if the Pagerank drops from 6 to 4, or if the Alexa rank drops considerably.

Swoosty SEO Tools is an extension for the Firefox web browser that displays both the Pagerank and the Alexarank in the Firefox status bar so that they are visible all the time.

But those are just two of the features of the extension. A right-click on the menu button in the status bar displays a menu packed with additional features and options.

The features are divided into service or search engine specific information, for instance the number of backlinks in Google, the indexed pages in Bing or the Alexa traffic details.

Links to several other services are provided, for instance to McAfee Site Advisor, GoingUp which analyzes the website or a Whois lookup.

And then you have got site specific features that are executed by the extension directly. You can take a look at a site’s robots.txt, check the keyword density of a specific page, generate a link report or highlight a specific keyword or all nofollow links on the page.

The majority of features you’d expect from a SEO analysis tool are there, even though most of them are not that comfortable to reach. An option to place some of the features as icons in the status bar or in the right-click context menu would improve this considerably.

So is something missing? More direct information in the status bar, for instance a site’s compete rank could be interesting for some SEOs, and a link to Google’s Webmaster Tools section and maybe some Analytics services would also be nice.

Swoosty SEO Tools is nevertheless a near complete SEO tool for the Firefox web browser. You can install the add-on directly from the official Firefox add-on repository over at Mozilla.

The only available option is counting the results manually, which can take some time depending on the number of results per page. The Google Chrome and Firefox add-on Google Ordered Lists has primarily been designed for search engine optimizers who want to assess a website’s ranking on first glance.

The extensions are compatible with all supported result page sizes, from the standard ten results to the maximum of one hundred results per page.

search results

Ordered lists are shown as decimal numbers by default. This can be changed in the extension’s options, so that Roman numerals are displayed instead.

Google Ordered Lists can be helpful for users who track search engine rankings manually in Google, especially those who display more than ten results per page. It may also be interesting for users who want some orientation, again more so if more than 10 entries are displayed in Google.

Firefox users can download Google Ordered Lists from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository, Google Chrome users from the Google Chrome Extension Gallery.

New websites are not found by default and SEO, done knowingly or not, helps increase a website’s visibility so that it attracts visitors and search engines. Everything that improves the visibility is SEO including submitting the website to search engines or directories, writing articles on the website, twittering about the new website, doing link exchanges or building links.

SEO Tools help the webmaster in the process. They provide many features that could also be handled manually but time constraints usually make those tools the best choice. Search Engine Optimization extensions for Firefox handle many tasks for the webmaster. This ranges from displaying information about a website like its Pagerank, Alexarank or backlinks over the IP address, domain age, country the web server is hosted in, directory listings to website validations and keywords.

The following ten tools are SEO extensions for the Firefox 3.x web browser.

General Purpose SEO Extensions:

SEO Quake

SEO Quake offers two features. First a SEO toolbar that displays information about every website visited and integration in major search engines like Google or Bing to display factors for the websites in the search results.

The extension displays the Google Pagerank, indexation in Google, Bing and Yahoo, Alexarank, domain age and links that point to other pages on the same domain and external domains. Lots of information that can be very useful for Search Engine Optimization.

Webmasters should make sure to only turn on the extension when they need it as it can lead to a temporary Google Ban because of all the connections that it establishes in a short amount of time.

Sen Seo

Sen Seo is an add-on that integrates itself into the Firebug web development add-on. It can analyze the onpage factors of a website to provide the webmaster with information about optimizations that can be done on the page to improve the website.

It analyzes for instance the title, meta tags, page content or domain and provides suggestions on how to improve those factors.

SEO Status

A lightweight add-on that places two elements in a Firefox toolbar. These elements display a website’s Pagerank and Alexarank. The add-on offers additional information in its menu including website whois information or backlink checks.

SEO Open

Provides a context menu with many options including checking backlinks in various search engines, cached pages, Pagerank, Alexarank, keyword density and more. The options look very similar to the ones provided by SEO Status.

Web Page SEO Analysis Tool

This extension can be used to perform a basic analysis of a page. Information that are displayed include general status, meta tags listing, meta tags analysis, the pages displayed within search engine results, keywords found in the anchor tags, keywords found in the image “alt” attribute text, keywords found on the page, URLs found in the page, headers returned from the server.

SEO Toolbars:

Foxy SEO Toolbar

A toolbar that provides links to many information about a website. From keyword research to network information, backlinks and Pagerank. Definitely one of the most extensive SEO extensions for Firefox.

Webrank Toolbar

A toolbar that displays the following information: Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Quantcast Rank, Pages indexed in Google, Pages indexed in Bing, Pages indexed in Yahoo.

SEO Toolbar

The SEO Toolbar shows PageRank, Alexa Rank, Popularity Index Rank for any website you visit on the one toolbar. Other SEO features include Search Engine view, server header view, Wayback Machine button and links to many SEO forums and websites.

Specialized Tools:

Google Semantics

This Firefox extension helps to get synonyms for keywords for Latent Semantic Indexing. Search engines use synonyms in their relevancy calculations.

Google Camo

A Firefox extension that simply manages and monitors your Google personalized search results. This plug-in is designed to allow SEOs to easily and automatically opt out of Google personalized search when signed out of their Google account.

SEM Tools

A complex extension for search engine marketing with the following core features:

• Search box to quickly check Google and Yahoo in other countries/languages.
• Search box is fully customizable and can find the current search term on most search engines.
• Search box can open multiple pages at once either in separate tabs or in one tab in frames.
• Highlights text ads by color based on companies in Google and Yahoo.
• Get Links will grab all URLs and link text from any page and then you can filter them and select just the ones you need.
• Check a list of URLs to make sure they are all working and find out what page they actually redirect to.
• Grab a list of campaign names and campaign IDs from the Google Adwords campaign page.
• Keyword creation tools like join, replace and group.
• URL decoder uncloaks the URL of ads on sites like Yahoo and Baidu.

There is also another tool which currently displays an error message when trying to access the page at the Mozilla website. It is called Search Status. The extension displays the Pagerank, Alexarank, Compete and mozRank in a Firefox toolbar. It can be installed by visiting the search results page for SEO at Mozilla and clicking on the Install Addon button next to the add-on (after scrolling down to locate it).

Search engine algorithms have become sophisticated over the years and some changes can have great impact on a website’s visibility in the search engines. Most SEO tools assist the webmaster in this regard by analyzing the contents of the website and relevant ranking factors to propose improvements to influence a website’s rankings in the search engines.

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit is part of Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer which can be downloaded from the Microsoft homepage. The core components of the Web Platform installer will be installed with the SEO Toolkit.

The Search Engine Optimization Toolkit can be found in the What’s New section of the installer.

A new analysis can be started once the installation has been finished. The webmaster needs to supply a project name and url of the website. The advanced settings limit the number of urls and download size per url as well as other settings like ignoring nofollow and noindex attributes, authentication or external link definitions.

The number of urls and the performance of the local Internet connection and that of the web server influence the time it takes to retrieve the data and generate the report. The report concentrates on onpage factors of the website. It is divided into the five sections Summary, Violations, Content, Performance and Links.

Summary:

Displays a basic summary that includes the url, start and end date, downloaded items, links and violations. This summary seems to be buggy as it reported back 0 links and violations which did not correspond with the data found in the violations and links section of the report.

Violations:

Violations are divided into warnings, information and errors. The violation summary lists all violation categories, their level and count. Typical violations are page titles that are to long, broken hyperlinks or mission descriptions. Some of the violations that are listed on the page are not seen as such by members of the SEO community. It is therefor recommended to research the entries before starting to make changes to the website. Violations can be listed in the summary view or sorted by most violations, by category or violation level.

A double-click on an entry will load the urls where those violations have been found.

This opens a window with powerful information about urls with violations. The tabbed interface provides detailed information about the page (content length, title, meta tags or url), the violation type and recommended actions, page header information, content (source or website), word analysis (total words, unique words, two words, three words, text), incoming (from the same domain) and outgoing links and additional violations found on that specific page.

Another interesting option is to display the routs to the specific pages. This will list the top 5 routes that visitors can take to reach that specific page on the website.

Content:

The content category lists various content related information about the analyzed website including duplicate files, titles, descriptions, keywords as well as large content, content that has not been found or pages with broken links.

Performance:

Lists the performance of the pages that have been crawled by the Search Engine Optimization Toolkit. This category lists slow pages which can be sorted by directory, content type and pages with many resources.

Links:

Provides a detailed analysis of the links found on the pages that have been analyzed. It provides an overview of the pages with the most links, the pages that are linked the most, redirects, links that are blocked by robots.txt, links by protocol and link depth.

Export options

The SEO toolkit will also allow you to export your results as CSV files which may be loaded and viewed in Excel or other spreadsheet software. For an example of this, take a look at the ‘Violation Categories’ tab. You’ll see each of your violation categories listed. Here you can see my site showing 2146 various violations!

You can generate a CSV file with details of the Violation using the ‘Report’ button at the top of the screen. This selection will offer a comprehensive report if you choose “Export all violations”. Once data is in a CSV file, you can manipulate and resave as an Excel file.

If you prefer to customize the fields that are reported, you can do this using the Query Engine use the which is available by pressing the ‘Query’ button at the top of the report, and selecting ‘New Violations Query’.

(via Web Platform Blog)

Verdict:

Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Toolkit offers a detailed analysis of a website’s onpage SEO factors. Errors that are reported by the tool should be fixed by the webmaster as soon as possible. Violations or warnings on the other hand need to be analyzed more carefully to avoid over-optimizing a website.

Advanced tips are not that easy to come by and most websites running a WordPress blog do not have them implemented. This article will list some options that center around the nofollow tag. Nofollow basically tells search engines like Google to not count the link vote that is usually being passed when linking on the Internet. Why is that beneficial? A website has a certain linking power. Each link that is pointing to internal and external resources gets a piece of that linking power. Not all pages should be treated equally however which is what this article is about. It makes for example no sense to pass linking power to internal pages that you do not want to link for, think of privacy policies, contact pages, login, log off or social bookmarking links.

WordPress themes come with a surprising amount of links, the majority of which is not set to nofollow. Here are a few areas where you should consider placing the nofollow link tag in a WordPress blog:

• The more (read more) tag. The page is already linked from the title of the post properly.
• WordPress meta data
• Pages like Privacy Policies, Contact Us
• Social Bookmarking links

To add the nofollow link one would simply add the rel="nofollow"
tag to the link structure which is not a problem if the link is displayed in the source code of the theme, for example:

<a href="http://www.example.com/" rel="nofollow">Example Link</a>

There are however links (like the previously mentioned more tag) that cannot be manipulated in the theme source as the link is created by a php function.

Here is how you make the more tag in WordPress nofollow:

• Open the file post-template.php in the wp-includes folder.
• Locate the following line beginning with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink()..

• Replace it with:

  $output .= ‘ <a href="’. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\" rel=\"nofollow\">$more_link_text</a>";

• You basically add the rel=\"nofollow\" tag to the line

This ensures that all more tags will be nofollow from then on.

Most search engines do not talk about SEO. This has lead to an incredible amount of SEO related content on the Internet which is usually a mix of experience, rumors, false assumptions and guesswork.

In a somewhat surprising move Google published the SEO Starter Guide on their website. The guide concentrates on onpage SEO and mentions offpage SEO only briefly. Experienced webmasters will not find anything revolutionary in the pdf document which is clearly aimed at webmasters who never came in contact with SEO articles before.

It’s a good read for those webmasters. One thing that’s done well in the SEO guide is the screenshots that are tied to Google search results to show the effects of certain elements on the website.

No secrets are revealed in the guide but since it is only 22 pages it might be a good read for just about anyone.

Professional webmasters use search engine optimization software to check the search engine position of their keywords. Those software applications provide a history, comparison and access to hundreds of other information that can all be useful in determining why a website is ranking the way it is.

Low budget webmasters have to either rely on manual searches which is so time consuming that one could spend a whole day checking a few dozen keywords in the major search engines.

That’s where SERPs Finder comes into play. The basic SEO tool can check the search engine position of a given keyword in the major three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Windows Live).

It checks the first hundred results only for Google who like to temporarily ban an IP from their search engine if excessive use has been detected. The other two search engines are checked for the first 1000 results.

It is only possible to check the results in one search engine at a time. The user will be notified if the website is found in the results and the search engine position checker will load that search result’s page in the default browser.

SERP’s Finder is no tool for webmasters who want to check hundreds of keywords but it is great for small websites with only a few keywords.