My SEO “Must Have” Extensions for Firefox

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20070520-firefox_logoThere are a lot of different Firefox extensions, plugins, scripts and more for doing SEO, but which ones really make a difference? Here’s my list of “must haves” for doing SEO with Firefox.

My SEO “must haves” for Firefox

1) Firebug

Firebug is a powerful web development tool that helps you to “see” your HTML, CSS and Javascript as you browse around your webpage. It’s perfect for checking the semantic HTML structure of your site is exactly right. Clicking “Inspect” will show the exact code for the section of the webpage you’re mousing over. Really powerful stuff for making sure the changes you’ve asked for have been implemented!

firebug-21

Download the latest version (last updated Feb 23rd, 2009) of Firebug – which works with Firefox 3.

2) Speed up your web pages with YSlow (Firebug extension)

YSlow is a Yahoo developer tool that extends Firebug to allow you to analyse web pages from a page load / performance point of view. The best part is that YSlow tells you why the page is slow and what elements to change to improve performance. Check out this “review” of my website:

yslow for Firebug

I *think that the “F” in “Performance Grade F” stands for FAIL. Anyway, if you want to add YSlow! to Firebug – download it here. (The 85k download takes a fair while. I’m sure there’s an irony in there somewhere..)

3) Get Greasemonkey

Greasemonkey allows you to customise the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.You need Greasemonkey for Joost’s “Show those Nofollows” script which we’ll look at next. There’s a wealth of Greasemonkey scripts available at Userscripts.org – I’ve sorted that link so it displays the most popular script downloads. Amazing that the 6th most popular download says “Do not download this code”. Hmm.

4) Show those Nofollows!

Joost hosts an excellent little script for Greasemonkey, the imaginatively titled “Nofollow display Greasemonkey script“. Install it to be able to quickly identify Nofollows on any webpage you browse inside Firefox.

5) Show Class=”robots-nocontent”

If nofollows are “miniscule compared to all the links” on the web, the number of class=”robots-nocontent” instances out there must be practically infinitesimal. That said, you might want to be able to see areas on a webpage that make use of this class attribute. I’m still yet to find a Greasemonkey script for this so I have a method using the Chrone Edit Plus extension which makes your webpage look like this:

nocontent

6) Google Global Firefox Extension (V2)

Redfly Marketing’s Firefox extension is such a powerful little tool. With Google Global installed you can quickly switch between Google search TLD’s (.co.uk, .com, .ca, .de etc) with a simple right mouse button click:

google global firefox plugin

Get Google Global from Redfly Marketing here.

7) User agent switcher

Changing User Agents in Firefox is a very nessecary part of SEO diagnostic work on most dynamic websites. Why? Well sometimes webmasters *accidentally serve different content to browsers, search bots and so on.

If you want to find out how to switch User Agents in Firefox, try my Youmoz post here. There’s a much easier way thanks to User Agent Switcher:

user agent switcher

As Anne recommends, you can download User Agent Switcher here and you can download a lot of User Agents in an XML file here. You can test that you’re correctly switching UA’s by checking out MSDN’s website as Googlebot. Why they bother doing that I’ll never know. Then again, noone seems to care that Yahoo still cloak links from Google. :-)

*May not be accidental

8) Live HTTP Headers

Live HTTP Headers shows you exactly what’s being sent in the client request and what server header responses are recieved as you click around. There are lots of these tools around, but I like this one. Don’t know why – download it here.

live http headers firefox

9) Toolbars?

I know what you’re thinking, where are all the toolbars? I have Google Toolbar and that’s about it. There are so many of them for SEO. Some of my fellow SEOs at the office use the SEO toolbar from SEObook and I played with the SEOmoz toolbar for a while. They’re both useful in their own way, it’s just that I’m a little “old school” and prefer my own setup. That said, I’m a massive fan of the Web Developer Toolbar:

web developer toolbar

Download it here and enjoy hours of fun disabling Javascript, CSS, images and all sorts of other stuff. Still the best toolbar you could have as an SEO, in my humble opinion.

10) Ubiquity

Ubiquity is an amazingly powerful tool enabling Javascript powered keyboard shortcuts to run your Firefox session. There are a lot of really clever people out there who truly understand how to use it. I don’t. Apart from the “Edit” function of course:

ubiquity in webpage edit mode

I like this particular function so much because it saves a lot of time from making change specifications for websites. Just make the edits and take a screen capture with Snagit or Gimp in Ubuntu. All done.

I hope my list is useful, I know there might be some really great plugins and extensions that I may have missed, but this is definitely my favourite setup for Firefox and has been for a while now. Enjoy!

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Comments

  2. Facundo

    Nice list. I really love the Ubuntu subliminal messages!

    I think you re missing two other great SEO extensions: firebug’s SenSEO and SEOQuake.

  3. richardbaxterseo

    @Facundo – Hehe! Caught red handed. Just doing my bit for the pro-linux movement…

    Thanks for the heads ups on the Firebug extenstions – I’ll check them out :-)

  8. Online Internet Faxing

    Great post, I’ll second that SEOQuake is missing that is by far the SEO plugin that I use the most. I also have SearchStatus installed as its handy to quickly right click to view the Google cache and see page PRs with little overhead.

  10. Alwin

    Really a very helpful post Thanks a lot dude. The Keysearch Analytics blog has tips, tricks, advice and case studies for the search marketing industry.

  17. David Carralon

    hey Richard, thanks for sharing all these tool, I picked 3 of them as I read through your post. The Yslow extension and Google global one both alone are worth every minute spent on your site. thank you.
    David

  21. Dave Davis

    Just got through reading all of your top posts of 2009. Brilliant stuff Richard. This being the last one to read, I realized that I never thanked you for the mention!

    Thanks so much!

    You have officially been moved into my “Must Read” folder in my feed reader. :)