According to W3school’s browser stats, Firefox is the second most popular browser today. So what makes Firefox so great?
· Mozilla Firefox is a free, cross platform browser (it is available for windows, Mac OS & Linux platforms).
· Firefox is equipped with a search bar that allows users to perform a web search directly from their browsers.
· A simple tap of CTRL+T opens a new tab which allows users to visit multiple websites, thus making it much easier to switch between pages.
There are a lot of SEO tools available with Firefox that can be used to analyse and track the performance of a website in search engines. We have listed some free tools which can help you to understand your website better from a search engine perspective.
SEOpen: The features of this tool can be accessed by right-clicking an open area on a web page or by using the included toolbar; the tool lists about 23 different metrics that help you in understanding the website better from a search perspective.
YExplore: This tool is very handy for quickaccess to search engine & social media information. Just use the mouse to right click and retrieve a mountain of information about any site that you may wish to analyse.
Web Developer: This tool adds various web developer tools that allow you to visualise the website from a coding perspective. This tool is recommended for advanced users with a basic understanding of CSS, HTML, JavaScript, debugging errors and more.
SEOquake: It is a very popular (and very handy!) SEO tool which gives detailed information about the websites Google indexes, as well as providing information on page rank and many other parameters. It also has a feature which highlights no follow links and another which determines the overall keyword density of a particular phrase.
Search Status: This is a really useful tool which can be used when analysing the website from an onsite perspective. You can also check robots and sitemap file issues along with a wide range of existing features which just makes the analysis work a lot simpler!
SEO for Firefox: This tool pulls useful market research data directly into the search results, thus making the analysis job easier. It also links to the sources from where the data is extracted which makes it easy to verify the data to further analyse it.
SEOMOZ Toolbar: This uses the patent technology introduced by SEOMOZ. The technology assigns mathematical value to the websites based on the authority of incoming links. It also gives additional metrics that can be useful while analysing a website. In addition to this, it can help you to get rid of location based results by creating custom searches according to a country/region.
Firebug: This tool is again recommended for advanced users and is an extension to the web developer add-on. Although it is a tool recommended for web developers, it will allow you to inspect the HTML code, check for header tags, analyse network usage and performance. It also helps with debugging and works with Google page speed to determine loading issues faced by the website.
Feedly: Now that Google reader will be retiring soon,we will need another application to replace it; Feedly takes care of the process more elegantly thereby enhancing the overall UI. It works alongside the browser which makes it easier for you to read your daily news and blog feeds.
Yslow: Yslow is quite old, but it still remains a strong tool which was introduced by Yahoo; it helps you in analysing web pages. It also suggests ways in which the performance of the page can be improved.
Shareoholic: The world today is driven by social; Shareholic makes sharing and discovering content online as easy as the click of a button. It has functions that help you share content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and more exiting places on the web.
Page Speed: This tool was introduced by Google to evaluate the performance of pages within the site and optimise them to ensure that the best UI is delivered. Fast and optimised pages are directly related to the overall user engagement with the website, thereby influencing the conversion potential for the website.
GA: This is a free Firefox add-on that lets you determine if a website has Google Analytics installed and working.Information is available by just hovering your mouse over the toolbar to determine whether the GA code is in place and working correctly.
YOAST Un-Personalize Search Results: This is another tool that helps in viewing un-personalised results from search engines. As results from the search engines are served to users based on the cookie set in their system, this tool overrides the cookie and provides unbiased results for the user against specific search queries.
Web Page Screenshot: As the name suggests, this tool captures the webpage as a screenshot and the file can be saved as a PDF/PNG/GIF/JPEG/BMP. This tool can be used to better understand the web pages which are visible to the users, and understand and plot their flow through the site.
ScribeFire Next: Is a full-featured blog editor that can be integrated with your browser; it allows you to create blog posts on your blogging platforms.
We have tried to list some very basic tools that will help you to analyse and report SEO issues whilst looking at a website. My personal favourites are Search Status, the SEOMOZ toolbar, Firebug and Page Speed tools which I use on a daily basis while conducting SEO audits. With Google laying a lot of emphasis on loading times, and since it’s closely tied with the Keyword rankings, Firebug, Page Speed & the web developer tools are essential.If you think we are missing out any excellent SEO tools that you’ve discovered, just let us know; we would love to add them to the list!
