Little programs that make a big difference: SEO toolbars, browser plugins and add-ons are helpful tools for everyday marketing. They support advertisers across a number of disciplines in search engine optimisation. Whether you’re analysing website performance or evaluating link profiles, with the right SEO browser plugins, you can save yourself some stress and cut some corners while making sure your SEO activity is as effective as possible. We’ll introduce you to the best tools to help you improve your SEO with simple browser plugins and extensions.
Firebug isn’t really an SEO plugin in the traditional sense, but more of a developer console for Firefox. It allows you to analyse individual website elements by measures like source code, forwarding, and loading time. After you’ve localised particular HTML elements, you can edit these directly in your Firefox browser. It’s also possible to adapt CSS rules directly, too. These changes won’t automatically save permanently either: they’re stored temporarily in your browser application to show you how the changes will look.
The Google Chrome equivalent of Firebug is the ‘Web Developer’ extension by Google. This is a more traditional SEO add-on, with a complete range of functions that gives the web developer control of all areas of a website. With the click of a button, you can activate or deactivate numerous functions of each loaded web page, like the cache function, JavaScript, meta redirections, or colours. The Web Developer add-on also allows you to display used Cookies, which can be deleted or changed. The CSS tools available offer users the chance to edit every stylesheet on their website. Web Developer offers countless other features too, making it a must for Google Chrome users and much more than just an SEO tool.
Linkparser is a useful little tool for analysing link structure. The plugin offers 9 different link types (e.g. internal/external, dofollow/nofollow). You can check out the number of relevant links as a preview in the browser – before then determining which link types are actually displayed by the tool. One click on the browser symbol will highlight all the corresponding links that you’re planning to display.
This analysis tool from Moz.com will be familiar to many users with previous SEO experience, as it’s one of the most popular and trusted SEO plugins. The Moz toolbar automatically displays different metrics for off-page analysis every time you load a web page. This includes (among other things) what’s known as the Moz Rank (an in-house code that measures the link popularity of a web page), page authority, domain authority, and the number of backlinks. Along with the toolbar, MozBar also offers an ‘Overlay’, which can be found by clicking on the Moz symbol. Here, you can find further information about page elements and attributes (URL, title, meta description, main heading, etc.) and use this as a basis for carrying out on-page analysis and optimisation later on. The toolbar and Overlay aside, Moz even displays relevant link data under search results.
The SEOquake toolbar is another established plugin in the SEO scene and offers similar functions to MozBar. The tool delivers all relevant metrics for individual pages (e.g. PageRank) for all available search engines. Users can access information like link profiles, titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords with the click of a mouse. SEOquake offers a number of individual settings available and a great range of general functions. Many useful additional functions are available, like an integrated Whois query to give you information on the owner and server location of a web page, and access to a web archive that displays the page in all its previous versions.
The Majestic SEO browser plugin focuses more on backlinks. All relevant figures like backlink figures, values, strengths, and trust factors are taken care of. In order to manage all this, the Majestic tool relies on a huge backlink database. This is particularly practical for the user: all important values can be visualised and clearly displayed with the click of a mouse.
A very important (technical) ranking factor is the loading time of a page. Optimising what’s known as your page speed can be achieved very easily through the Google tool PageSpeed Insights. As a result of the mobile boom and the accompanying growth in relevance for loading times on mobile devices, this tool is incredibly valuable for any web page operator. Although this isn’t presently available as a browser plugin, using this online tool (available via the Google Web Developer Tools page) allows you to carry out web page analyses directly in your browser.
The SEO add-on Seerobots checks a website for its ‘robots’ meta tags. For background information, ‘robots’ tags are useful for websites that are being built or currently undergoing maintenance. In circumstances like these, web operators usually try to avoid being indexed by Google until everything is finished and meets the search engine’s guidelines. As a result, programmers use the meta tag ‘robots’ with the attributes ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’, to let the GoogleBot know that the page shouldn’t be indexed. After a page or website is fully updated and ready to be indexed by Google, this tool helps to maintain an overview of the indexing procedure by marking pages with coloured tags.
The extensions listed above are quick to install and simplify your daily SEO work considerably. But be aware: If you install too many different plugins and SEO toolbars, you’ll be literally unable to view the browser clearly anymore for the sheer number of extensions. But paradoxically, the best way to make sure you always keep your focus on the essentials could be to install one more add-on: the One Click Extension Manager (only available for Chrome) can tidy up your extensions, turning unused ones off or making them invisible with the click of a button, meaning you don’t need to continue scrolling through menus to keep your browser looking clean.
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