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.

FireFox – This isn’t really a SEO tool per se, but more of a requirement. Most SEO tools on the Internet require FireFox and the reason is simple: FireFox allows plugins. FireFox is an amazing browser which has gained astounding ground since its release leaving Internet Explorer to the not-so-tech-savvy and those who are currently using Internet Explorer to download FireFox!

NoDoFollow – This is very handy tool to find whether links on a site are no-follow or do-follow. When doing SEO for Google, Internet marketers prefer their site’s back links to be do-follow. Do-follow back links raise a website up in Google SERPs more so than no-follow links. It’s important to know whether a site gives do-follow links or no-follow links when doing link building. The NoDoFollow Firefox plugin (yes, you’re going to need FireFox for this one) allows link builders to differentiate between do-follow and no-follow links.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Anyone looking to earn money from creating and doing search engine optimization on niche sites will have to do keyword research. Those versed in SEO already know this, but there are a lot of SEO newbies out there who have neve rheard of keyword research. This is extremely important. Doing keyword research often means the difference of making cents or dollars online. It’s a good idea to know which keywords make money and which don’t before spending time and money doing SEO for a site. Doing keyword research prevents that time and money from being wasted — most of the time. Surprisingly, there are a lot of people who don’t even do keyword research!

SEO for Firefox Extension – This is a major time saver. Those who’ve ever had a full piggy bank as a child and counted out all the change before taking it to the bank where the teller just dumped the change into a machine that counts the change in a matter of seconds can appreciate the time saved with this addon. Those on dial-up will also appreciate this. When doing keyword research it’s important to know the Google Page Rank of a site and how many back links from Yahoo of probably hundreds of sites depending on how many keywords researched. Instead of inputting each site into some online Page Rank checking and manually going to Yahoo to find how back links a site has, this tool allows Googlers to see ALL this information and more right in Google search when they’re researching each individual keyword.

Website Marketing SEO Score Tool – This is actually pretty cool. This tool gives web site owners to see what’s wrong with their website. This tool gives each site a score and tells what could be done differently. Of course, anyone can manually check all this stuff themselves, but this is great for a nice pick me up and it can be used as a learning tool.

All in One SEO Pack – Have a niche site? If so, you probably use WordPress. I’m not making fun of Blogger users, but those using WordPress do have a significant SEO advantage over those who use Blogger. If you’re a niche site person like me, you’ve probably got WordPress. This tool configures WordPress blogs to be very SEO friendly and is highly popular among literally the whole niche marketing crowd. It’s important not to use something because it’s popular, but because it works. However, this is popular for a reason.