Well, I was looking at my browser today while I was link building and I want to just show how GREAT my set up is. First off, I use FireFox and so should you. Internet Explorer sucks. If you have any suggestions of what I am missing, then please feel free to post a comment below with some suggestions. Anyway, here is the whole seo set up I have built up over time. The SEOmoz Toolbar is legit because of the Pro membership. If you take your work seriously, I alway suggest subscribing to some form of paid SEO tools. I choose SEOMOZ’s tools because I like them the best. Anyway, let’s take a look at what I have going on.
Starting at the top….
As you can see I have quite a bit of bookmarks that I actually use a lot…here is the list for those of you interested:
- http://www.seomoz.org
- https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
- www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
- https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox
- http://www.spyfu.com
- http://www.google.com/insights/search/#
- http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
- http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
- http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/Default.aspx
- http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
- http://compete.com
- http://validator.w3.org/
- http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/
- http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer/
- http://www.noupe.com/php/htaccess-techniques.html
Just feel free to check them out. Most of those links are pretty self explanatory and I always end up needing to use or get to those sites often. So, maybe you will too.
Next on the list is the FireFox add on FoxySEO.
This plugin is the biggest time saver in the history of time. I probably use FoxySEO just as much as I use my mouse. It’s ridiulously great. It’s basically just a list of short cuts to sites that are extememly valuable. As you can see below, it is right under my super awesome bookmarks.
Foxy SEO in a nutshell (from the addon page):
Foxy SEO Tool is a free, open source toolbar that provides quick and easy access to a multitude of search engine functions such as Google Site, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live Fromlinks. Also included are famous web traffic analysis sites such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, popular statistic aggregators like Quarkbase and WebSiteOutlook. You can check a site’s listing in important directories like Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory, buzzing Web 2.0 sites such as Technocrati, Wikipedia, Digg, Delicious and links to useful network functions like Whois, Geotool, Internet Archive, etc.
The tools menu currently offer a Spider Simulator function which displays a web page just as a search engine would read it, in the order of the html code of the page, without the layout code. The experts will appreciate.
The toolbar also has convenient links to many big name sites publishing hot topics for niche ideas and links to the always necessary keywords research services.
If your Firefox menu is already cluttered with a lot of indispensable toolbars, you can easily disable it and just use the contextual pop menu instead (right click menu).
SEOmoz Toolbar A.K.A. MozBar (a wealth of sophisticated search marketing tools to help your SEO efforts)
Next we take a look at my personal choice of search marketing tools. There are others out there, like SEObooks, but I choose this tool set.
Some of the features include:
Quick Access to Linkscape Metrics
- mozRank™ (mR) and mozTrust™ (mT) for every URL that you visit.
- Domain mozRank™ (DmR) and Domain mozTrust™ (DmT) too!
- The number of external URLs and domains linking to the page.
- Learn more about Linkscape metrics.
Quick Access to SEOmoz Tools and Resources
- Quickly and painlessly access SEOmoz tools such as Trifecta, Keyword Difficulty and even Linkscape.
- Make use of other 3rd party tools to check other useful page and domain information.
- Easy access to PRO member features, such as Q&A, videos and PRO tips.
Other SEO-Friendly Features
- Highlighting of no-followed links.
- “Analyze Page” overlay, exposing tons of great SEO metrics.
To the bottom- YSLOW and Firebug
YSlow is a great tool to work out page load time kinks. YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset. It offers suggestions for improving the page’s performance, summarizes the page’s components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.it™ and JSLint.
Firebug isn’t necessarily just for SEO’s, but it’s overall purpose is to give you the ability to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. It’s just a mouse click away when you need to check something out.
And then we have Live HTTP headers.
This neat little tool will let you check out what status code your sites server is returning…just remember, 200 is the best number ever. 404 is the devils number, not 666. In case you are not familiar with this blog…I have had a lot of problems with 404′s in the past.
OK, that’s pretty much it. I have some random tools as you can see, such as Java Console and things like that, but for the most part- these are the goods. If you don’t have this set up, get it. Also, if you are like me and NEED music….download FoxyTunes….control whatever player you use with your browser.
OK, So that’s a wrap. Now, please let me know if you have any hidden gems I don’t know about (I do know about Webmasters Toolkit but figured FireBug will be good enough for our purposes).
Thanks everyone and I hope it helped.
