One piece of software any optimizer ought to love is Firefox. Now some may say “Why Firefox, it’s only a browser?” Yes, it’s a browser, but one that supports a massive variety of plugins, some of them terribly helpful for search engine optimization. Thus let’s see what those plugins are:

1. SEOpen ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/ ): this is one among the most effective and most used Firefox seo plugins, and has several tools that make it a favourite of mine. Thus let’s examine what it can do:

* in Google it can check for: backlinks, indexed pages, related pages, cache and PageRank.
* in Yahoo and MSN: backlinks and indexed pages.
* for Alexa: overview, traffic details, backlinks and related sites.
* keyword density of the most used words on the page.
* DMOZ checker: see if the site is included within the directory.
* check for robots.txt.
* validator to test your page for errors (it uses the validator from www.w3.org).

There are more things, but these are the most important.

2. SEO Links ( http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/ ) is another extension I use everyday. When the extension si active and you hover over a link a tooltip will appear that can show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking knowledge for the URL and anchor text pair. When you’re merely browsing this can be annoying, however you’ll be able to simply deactivate it with a right-click!

This might be terribly easily used to test your search engine rankings for a bound page, and here is how: write up a list with all the keywords and keyphrases that you would like to rank for, and then link those words or phrases to the internet pages related to them!

Now each time you would like to check your ranks activate the SEO Links extension and hover over the links — you’ll see where your pages are in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

3. Don’t waste anymore of your precious screen assets simply to find out what your PageRank and AlexaRank is! SearchStatus ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/ ) will sit anywhere you would like (I keep it in the status bar) and you will receive the valuable info at a glance. However this little tool can do a lot a lot of than that:

* it shows what metatags a site has
* checks for backlinks and indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and MSN
* it shows the robots.txt file
* keyword density report function
* and best of all: the highlight “nofollow” links will show you what links can be followed by search engine spiders — very helpful when you would like to submit your web site to a directory and don’t grasp if it will matter from a seo perspective.

So in case you are not using Firefox, go get it! It might be your relief when it comes to search engine optimization!

Florin Costache writes on a daily seo blog for Romanian webmasters, known as Optimizare pentru motoarele de cautare (a.k.a. search engine optimization for those that do not speak Romanian).

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