Top 6 Advanced SEO Firefox Plugins

Its seems everyone has an opinion on what the best SEO Firefox plugins are. Most of the posts out there cover the basic SEO plugins that display Title tags, Page Description, Phrases length used within the page copy, etc.

So here are my Top 6 Advanced SEO plugins for Firefox. You’ll notice that all of these SEO plugins offer Page level metrics. Site wide metrics (i.e. Internal Linking, External linking, duplicate Meta data, etc ) are better viewed via Google’s Webmaster tools.

1  Search Status

Search Status has multiple metrics but the 3 most useful features are:

PageRank

Unlike Alexa rank Google’s PageRank arguably still means something

Link Report

Display’s the number of links on a page. Includes the number of internal and external links.

NoFollow link highlighting

A excellent feature that sets this plugin apart from any other. All links that carry a NoFollow attribute are highlighted pink when this feature is enabled. The NoFollow highlighting works at the link (rel=nofollow) and page (meta robots) level.

2  Web Developer toolbar

Probably the most used day to day SEO plugin with too many features to mention here:

Disable JavaScript

JavaScript can be used to load copy (i.e. Widgets), navigation (links), Maps and Search Results (Ajax). Crawlers don’t load JavaScript. Disabling it allows you to see what the page looks like to a crawler.

Disable Meta Redirects

Meta Redirects are not SEO friendly and can be easily missed or overlooked. Having this feature enabled will not redirect the browser to the destination page.

Disable CSS stylesheets

Search engines “see” content and not style. Disabling CSS stylesheets allows you to diagnosis page semantics. Content in Headline, lists and strong tags to name but a few.

HTML Validation

Poorly coded web pages make life harder for a crawler to discern content meaning. Validation is made against the page DTD (Document Type Definition) and the W3C set of recommendations.

3  Http Fox

There are many HTTP response plugins out there but this is by far the best.

Just press “start” and HTTP Firefox will record all the Http requests (from the browser) and responses (from the server) made when loading a page or navigating a site.

Extremely useful for Error handling diagnosis and redirection detection.

4  Firebug

The Firebug SEO plugin allows for HTML and CSS inspection. Clicking “inspect” allows you to hover over a page element and see HTML used to generate it.

5  YSlow

Technically YSlow is a Firebug extension and Not actually a Firefox SEO plugin, but that’s just splitting hairs. YSlow from Yahoo offers a suite of metrics related specifically to page load times. Page loading is already publicly  acknowledged by Google as a factor in determining a page’s “quality score” and the minimum bid required for Adwords advertising. And its suggested that load times are also becoming a factor in the general web results algorithm.

Yslow displays a page score covering 13 factors ranging from content compression (GZip and JavaScript Minify) to content placement and HTTP responses.

6  LinkChecker

The newest addition to my SEO plugins list. LinkChecker does “exactly what is say’s on the tin”. It will follow every link on a page and highlight that link depending on the Servers’ response. For example a request for a link with a server response 200 “OK” will be highlighted “Green” for Good or OK. Whilst a link that loads an error page (404, 410 or 500) will be highlighted another colour. Similarly a link that navigates to page with is redirected will be highlighted yet another colour.

It is best to run LinkChecker at the same time as Http Fox as the exact Server response will be displayed only in HTTP Fox.

LinkChecker helps a SEO analyst to find links that need to be updated. Even those that redirect successfully still increase page load time as the page is essentially requested twice from the server. This is poor for SEO and usability.

*Note The web Developer toolbar also contains a useful link checking feature found within the “tools” menu.

Hope that was useful. I would be keen to hear your favourite SEO plugins for Firefox… Have I missed any??