Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox both offer extensions that allow Web developers to utilize common SEO tools from within their Web browser. Using these extensions will save SEO experts and Webmasters tons of time in their analysis by automatically cross-referencing all of the different tracking and analysis services, from Google PageRank to Alexa.
Popular Chrome Apps
The following Apps offer solid tools for enhancing your SEO marketing efforts from within your browser.
#1: SEO for Chrome
SEO for Chrome provides access to Competitive Analysis, Backlink Checking, PageRank Checking, and Keyword Research. With SEO for Chrome, you can find out how much of a site’s traffic comes from organic Google search results and see how much they spend on PPC traffic. You can also analyze a site’s social media presence, including the number of Facebook likes, Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks, Digg digs, and StumbleUpon stumbles.
It offers a full feature set and was able to inform me of everything I wanted to know in one place. Since I prefer Chrome over other browsers, this is my go-to SEO tool.
Pros: SEO for Chrome is the only extension on this list that offers full social media statistics, making it vital for anyone who is focusing their efforts on social media marketing.
Cons: SEO for Chrome is not perfect and has a few bugs. It sometimes errors makes Chrome significantly slower to load.
#2: SEO SERP Workbench
The SEO SERP Workbench addon allows you to compare your search engine result placement with your competitors for different keywords you may be targeting.
For simply seeing how your SEO is influencing your search engine results, this App can’t be beat. Unfortunately, since this is the only functionality it offers, it takes second place to the more fully-featured SEO Tools for Chrome.
Pros: SEO SERP Workbench does one job, but it does it very well.
Cons: SEO SERP Workbench doesn’t offer as much customizability as SEO Tools for Chrome.
Popular Firefox Extensions
I am a huge fan of the following Firefox extensions for SEO analysis.
#1: SEO Quake
Simply the best SEO extension in Firefox. SEO Quake offers a range of functionality for analyzing search engine optimization and seeing how well your keywords are doing. Using the SEO Quake toolbar, you can check the PageRank of your current page, how many pages on the site are indexed (it should be all of them), the number of backlinks pointing to your current page, and other miscellaneous details.
SEO Quake is embedded in your search engine results. You can click on one of the embedded results to be redirected to the page, and you can sort your results by any of the parameters.
Pros: SEO Quake is powerful and extremely customizable.
Cons: SEO Quake offers a lot of information by default, and it places itself in your browser in three separate places. It takes some configuring to make this less obtrusive.
#2: SearchStatus
The reason I sometimes prefer SearchStatus over SEO Quake is the intrusiveness of SEO Quake. It does seem to put itself all over your browsing experience. SearchStatus offers the same information, but places it at the bottom of the page, on your status bar.
SearchStatus is particularly useful for quickly checking keyword densities and noticing when links are marked nofollow.
Pros: SearchStatus offers all of the relevant information, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, and Compete.com ranks, but does so unobtrusively. It can also break down the analysis to focus only on title tags and header tags, important SEO metrics.
Cons: SearchStatus does not offer as much information as SEO Quake or SEO Tools for Chrome.
Posted by Greg Henderson, an Internet Marketer and SEO Associate an email search site and free public records site: RecordsProject & MyFreeEmailSearch.
