Optimizing Firefox for Search Engine Optimization

Whether you are responsible for your company's SEO or have given that responsibility to other members of your team, if you handle your web site's SEO in-house, you are well aware of how time consuming it can be. Although the rewards of a well-optimized web site are almost always worth the effort, it still takes a lot of work and many, many hours to get to that point.

Although there is no way to completely automate the SEO process (ex. automatic link exchanges are worthless), there are steps you can take to make search engine optimization less time consuming.

For me personally, I have been able to reduce the amount of time I spend on SEO by finding and installing some great plug-ins for Firefox. These plug-ins have been able to reduce the amount of time that I spend on SEO because they provide the information I need at my fingertips.



I've tried many, many different plug-ins, and here are the three that I still use and recommend that you or your in-house SEO install and start using today:

SEO for Firefox: This is my favorite SEO plug-in and the one that I have been using for the longest. It was created by Aaron Wall of SEOBook. When you perform a search in Google, this plug-in allows you to instantly see the following for each result:



The other great feature of this plug-in is that you can customize which of these pieces of information you want to see. For example, if you don't care about the Alexa rank or the Bloglines subscribers, you can easily disable them and they won't show up in the results.

SearchStatus: Many times, when you are browsing through the internet, you will come across a web site that you are interested in seeing its SEO statistics. If you have the SearchStatus plug-in installed, this task is very simple to complete.

To begin with, SearchStatus displays the PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank for every web site you visit in the bottom right corner.

If you still need more information, all you need to do is right-click the SearchStatus icon (which is next to the information discussed above), and you will be able to access anything you want from the following menu:



X-Ray: As you know, on-page elements play a large role in properly optimizing a web site for search engines. When you are researching your competition, it can be useful to see how they are structuring their web pages. If you don't want to waste time jumping back and forth between the page and its source code, X-Ray can save you a lot of time.

With a simple right click, X-Ray allows you to see the tags on a page without viewing the source code, as shown below:



If you have your own SEO plug-in Firefox that you can't live without, be sure to leave a description and link to it in the comment area.