SEO Tools: SEO for Firefox

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Why Do Over 130,000 Webmasters Use SEO for Firefox?

Want to know why Google or Yahoo! ranks pages? If so this is the Firefox extension for you. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.

Want to learn more? Watch this video and/or read on.

Download & Installation Instructions:

You have to be using Firefox to get this to work. If you have not yet used Firefox go download Firefox, and then come back to this page using Firefox as your web browser.

After installation is complete, restart Firefox, then search Yahoo! or Google to verify this extension is working for you.

Off the start PageRank is the only thing that is automatically pulled into the SERPs. After you install SEO for Firefox and restart your browser you may want to configure the extension settings to pull in other useful data.

The Theory...

I like to just be able to glance at something and see if it is worth doing or not. Over time in the SEO game you sorta learn a feel for estimating keywords and markets, but it is helpful to have a few additional data points, especially if you are new to the market.

This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this tool also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data.

First Things First:

If you are casually surfing please turn this extension off. Only turn it on if you are actively researching a market.

In the status bar at the bottom of Firefox you can click the SEO for Firefox logo to turn it on or off.

If it is colorful it is on.

If it is gray it is off.

This extension also has courtesy settings which allow you to ping search engines for data at a slow rate. You probably want to set the delay to at least 1 or more seconds. If you set it at 0 do not be surprised if some of the engines at least temporarily block you for scraping data.

SEO for Firefox Extension Features:

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

Settings:

SEO for Firefox can be turned on or off globally. In addition, each particular piece of information also has three settings

Auto - automatically pulls in the data whenever you search Google or Yahoo!
On-Demand - link to pull in data will be present in search results, but the data will not be automatically pulled in until you click on the associated link
Hidden - if you do not find a particular data point useful you can remove that data point from the tool output.

By default most of the tool features are in the On-Demand state (not on Auto). This is done to ensure that those who would most likely be abusive users (by not following our usage tips) will be unable to use the tool to its full capability since they would not read these instructions on how to change the settings.

Recommended Settings:

Different data sources are more or less reliable than others.

Anything that you have on Auto should have at least a 1 second delay.
I would recommend putting Bloglines, Del.icio.us and Technorati on On-Demand (or if you have them on Auto set their delays to 5 seconds).
- Del.icio.us will give you 503 service unavailable errors if you ping it too quickly.
- Technorati tends to be quite unreliable.
- Ask.com was always pretty brutal with how they banned information scrapers on Ask.com, offering up lifetime bans if they thought you were excessively hogging resources. I am not sure how strict they are with Bloglines.
Since there are so many Yahoo! data points I would recommend only activating a few of those or setting those to 5 seconds if you have them all on Auto. If you query Yahoo! too quickly I believe they typically ban you for about a half hour or so.
I would probably put Alexa.com and Archive.org site age on at least a couple second delay if they are on Auto.

How to Change Your Settings:

While in Firefox look at the menu across the top of your browser. Click on the tools link.(or hit Alt T)
From the tools drop down menu click on extensions menu (or hit Alt E)
Scroll down to the SEO for Firefox extension. Right click on it and left click on options. In the example below I have del.icio.us set to on demand and I set one of the Yahoo! .edu link settings to Hidden
Hit ok when you have all of the settings set to your preferred setting.

Be a Kind User:

If you are casually surfing please turn this extension off. Only turn it on if you are actively researching a market.

In the status bar at the bottom of Firefox you can click the SEO for Firefox logo to turn it on or off.

If it is colorful it is on.

If it is gray it is off.

How to Update SEO for Firefox:

This extension also will periodically update when we add new features or to make up for when search engines change their search result footprints. There is no need to reinstall this extension to get it to update. To update this extension

While in Firefox look at the menu across the top of your browser. Click on the tools link.(or hit Alt T)
From the tools drop down menu click on extensions menu (or hit Alt E)
At the bottom of the extension box click the find updates button. If there is an update available for any of your extensions there will be an Update Now button to the right of the extension.

Update Log

I should have made one of these earlier, but...

Version 2.9 - added SEO X-ray feature
Version 2 to 2.89 - added Compete.com traffic estimates, updated it to support Firefox 3, added BOTW, maded each data point sortable, added l00 link to requery the current Google search with 100 results per page.

Possible Future Upgrades:

A status indicator would be helpful.
Is it listed in Digg?
Maybe proxy list checking?
May create a cache of your stats hosted on your machine such that if you click the back button to go back to the last search the data is still there.
Will see. Depends on feedback :)
Leave feedback here.

Other Useful Related Firefox Extensions and Goodies:

Rank Checker is well worth a look. If you want to see SEO data while you surf the web then I also recommend downloading the SEO Toolbar. View a list of related useful extensions on our SEO extension page.

Conflicting Extensions:

I have been told that for some people SEO for Firefox does not work well with CustomizeGoogle or Firefox BetterSearch 1.12.

There might also be a few other conflicting extensions. If this extension works on Yahoo! but not Google then check to see if you have some other potentially conflicting extension that is customizing Google. If it works on nothing then throw your computer out the window or read comments left by others here. If you still have questions you can ask them here.

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SEO for Firefox