One of Firefox’s Little SEO Secrets, SEOQuake
SEOQuake is a great extension for Firefox (now compatible with FireFox3!) that will show you almost anything you would want to know about the indexing of any website on the internet. There are a few ways to use it, you can have it show up as a sidebar-like device, a toolbar, or only shown under each website listing on a number of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati and a few others, I am sure.) This little thing will show you the Google Page Rank, Google Index, Google Links, Google Cache Date, Yahoo Index, Yahoo Links, Yahoo Link Domain, Yahoo Directory Links, MSN Index, MSN Links, Alexa Rank, Webarchive age of the domain, the robots.txt file for the website, a link to the WhoIs info, the keyword density of any specific webpage, and a whole lot more if you chose to include SEOQuake’s own little add-ons for this Firefox Add-on. (Would that make the SEOQuake add-ons like sub-add-ons for Firefox? I think we have stumbled onto something here…)
At first it all seems a bit confusing since there is a potential for so much information to be shown at once. If you are a beginner to the whole SEO scene, its best to take it slow and only really concentrate on the Google listings for now. Then you can go and read up on Link Domains, indexing, robots.txt and other META TAG information. If you are already pretty well versed in Search Engine Optimization knowledge, feel free to go ahead and customize the individual options inside of SEOQuake to fit your personal preferences. SEOQuake is not for everyone, and it may confuse and even enrage some users because it tends to slow down your browser a bit if you have it automatically loading on each page-click. The key here is to set all the options to ‘on request’ in the SEOQuake preferences to keep your normal browsing more or less unchanged.
If you do not want the SEOQuake sidebar-device OR the toolbar, you can just choose to turn both off and have SEOQuake only show you Search Engine Optimization information when you are playing around with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati, or your search engine of choice. Under every single hit on the search engines will be that little SEOQuake bar that you can click on to view more in-depth information about a particular website. This way you can do some basic checking up on your close competitors and see exact why they are in front of you in the rankings (for example, on the first page of Google for a certain keyword.)