A new extension is available for the Firefox browser called SEO For Firefox. It has been developed by Aaron Wall, famous for his SEOBook e-book publication and also his half ownership of Threadwatch, a popular blog style forum.
According to Jason Lee Miller of Web Pro News, The tool pulls data from a number of sources to offer search engine marketers “a more holistic view of the competitive landscape.”
I have downloaded and played with it briefly. It appears to be a pretty cool tool if you want to get a quick overview of marketing data regarding any specific project. Information is accessed via links that are added to the search engine results pages of either Google or Yahoo. Here is a run down of what the tool contains:
- PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority.
- Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
- Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain.
- .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain.
- .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
- .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain.
- Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page.
- del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
- Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs.
- Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
- Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
- dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
- Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
- dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
- WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.
This tool also links to a couple cool keyword research tools near the top of the search results, including:
- Google Trends – shows historical search volume trends
- SEO Book Keyword Research Tool – cross references many popular keyword research tools
- Overture View Bid – shows Yahoo!’s top bid prices for a particular keyword
- Google Traffic Estimator – shows top bid estimates and click volume estimates associated with Google AdWords.
- Google Keyword Sandbox – Google’s keyword research tool.
Aaron gives a complete run-down as well as screen shots at his blog. The tool can be turned on or off by a status indicator at the bottom right of the browser. He recommends that it only be used when conducting research and not just for casual browsing.
