Search-engine optimization (SEO) is often a tedious job and requires you to perform numerous tasks over and over. Fortunately, you can install SEO plug-ins onto your computer that enable you to save time and more efficiently carry out your SEO efforts.

Browser plug-ins have become increasingly popular because of the sheer amount of time they save during the search-engine-optimization process. Now, instead of browsing to several different Web sites to research your information, you can view all the data right from one spot in your Web browser.

By using SEO plugins, you can quickly access a Web site’s PageRank, its age, indexing, and backlink information, and even mentions of it in the social media space. Plug-ins can generate a list of topically related Web sites that can serve as your gateway to the online community for any given topic.

The SEO plug-ins commonly used for WordPress have been created out of necessity. The standard installation of WordPress is by far the most popular blogging software; however, it does not support commonly known best practices for on-page search-engine optimization. For this reason, SEO-savvy developers have taken the time to produce powerful plug-ins that make doing search-engine optimization for your blog far more effective and efficient. From custom title tags to automatic sitemap generation, these plug-ins are a must for publishers using WordPress to publish content.

Using the SEO for Firefox Plug-In

Aaron Wall has created what has become arguably the most useful and popular SEO plug-in to date, SEO for Firefox. This powerful tool displays in one place all the vital technical information you need to assess a Web site’s strength. By making use of the search engines and other various application program interfaces, or API s, SEO for Firefox offers a large amount of important data in seconds, saving you from having to go to multiple sources for that same data.

This tool can save an immense amount of precious time for any Internet marketer, and is literally a “must have” plug-in. This tool lists a Web site’s indexing information, backlink information, age,Google PageRank, listings in popular social media sites, as well as listings in large, powerful directories.

One of the most popular SEO browser extensions is SEO for Firefox, which was created by SEO expert Aaron Wall. SEO for Firefox gathers multiple pieces of marketing data about a Web site and displays that data within your browser alongside the search results from the Google or Yahoo search engine. Because the data is provided to you alongside the actual search results, the SEO for Firefox extension allows you to check the most important statistics of a Web site before you even visit the domain.

Some of the statistics made available by SEO for Firefox for quick view include Google PageRank, Yahoo page and domain links, and number of backlinks. These stats are all valuable pieces of information that, when used together, can give you a clear picture of the relative strength of a Web site. SEO for Firefox provides a very useful gauge for the number of backlinks a Web page and Web site have, as reported by Yahoo and MSN. The number and topical relevancy of a Web site’s backlinks are two of the most critical off-site SEO factors search engines use to determine ranking position in the organic search-engine results.

The SEO for Firefox backlinks indicator also provides the number of backlinks that come from a page on an education (.edu) domain, which is usually a primary indicator of the quality of any particular Web site. Links from a page on an .edu domain are generally believed to be more “trusted” because they are more difficult to attain than other domain extensions such as .com or .info. You can download SEO for Firefox at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html.

The SEO for Firefox extension offers a useful feature that allows you to look up the statistics of a Web page by simply right-clicking anywhere on that page, selecting SEO for Firefox from the menu that appears, and then clicking Lookup this Page.

This feature returns all the data for that particular Web page, without you having to perform a search at Google or Yahoo, which can save you considerable time as you evaluate the Web page. Be warned that the SEO for Firefox extension is resource intensive because it pulls data from multiple searchengine backend systems all at once. For this reason, you should do your day-to-day surfing with the extension turned off, and use it only while you are doing market research. Setting the data to be retrieved “on demand” rather than automatically is another alternative.

SEO for Firefox has gone through multiple upgrades, so future upgrades and improvements are likely to occur. According to SEO expert Aaron Wall, the SEO for Firefox extension is currently being used by over 50,000 Webmasters and Internet professionals.

Tags | browser, Firefox, plugins, SEO