Handy SEO Browser Extensions and Why I Finally Moved Over to Google Chrome

Mozilla Firefox has always been top dog for browser extensions – that’s a given. And a trusty servant for SEO folks with an abundance of Swiss Army Knife features.

But the pull of Google Chrome has been hard to resist. It has speed, reliability and more grace than the Fox.  So, from the start of 2011 I’ve been making the switch and it’s now complete.

In case you are considering whether Google Chrome is king, or interested in knowing what handy SEO tools exist, here’s a quick comparison:

All in One SEO Extensions

Chrome

• Chrome SEO – one click gives you backlinks, pages indexed, traffic details and more to help you monitor your site. Nofollowed links are highlighted and tops my Chrome list.
• SEO Site Tools – much of the above but also allows more detailed SEO auditing analysis, integration into Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, and has some useful SEOMOZ metrics.
• SEOQuake – similar to Chrome SEO (but not quite as good).

FireFox

• SEO for Firefox – requires registration but certainly is worth it. Similar to Chrome SEO and slightly more useful.
• SEOQuake – a close second behind SEO for Firefox with similar functions.

Both very close on this level.

Inspecting HTML/CSS

Firebug is pretty awesome in this area. Natively built for Firefox, it also has a lite version for Chrome. When you need a hand in analysing the technical SEO of a site Firebug comes is very useful allowing you to inspect and tweak HTML/CSS with ease. Google Chrome Developer Tools offers a similar experience to Firebug and I am starting to find it more useful.

Perhaps my favourite extension is the Web Developer Toolbar. Like Firebug and Google Chrome Developer Tools it’s aimed at developers but super useful for SEOs. It comes in Firefox and Chrome variants, and although both are nearly identical you can’t disable JavaScript in the WBT Chrome which is a hindrance. There is so much you can do with WBT, and here are a just few examples.

Monitoring Rankings

Google has become a tad more sensitive to automated queries when running rankings reports recently. This has made our jobs as SEOs a little harder and browser extensions a little less valuable. That said, the best browser rankings extension hands down is rank checker for Firefox. It allows up to 100 keywords to be checked at any one time, and run on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Chrome struggles to compete in this area but SEO SERP does allow you to check ‘one-off’ results very quickly.

Global: If you want to check rankings in different countries, you will want to install Google Global which works well on both Chrome and Firefox.

Speed

Google announced that ‘Page Speed’ would become a ranking factor at the end of 2009. Although only currently a slight factor, Google has repeatedly encouraged us to pay more attention to speed optimisation. Many speed test case studies show an increase in page load time of around three or four seconds can double conversions. This is something we are currently working on improving, and here are some tools to help:

• YSlow for Chrome and Firefox is a great tool for speed optimisation. It analyses a page and suggests page speed performance improvements.
• Page Speed for Google Chrome is also rather useful and similar to YSlow.

Wrap Up

IMO, Google Chrome is the new king! If you haven’t switched yet, what are you waiting for? Oh, I forgot to say – the Chrome getting as quick as a bunny. But surprisingly not quite as quick as Opera which wins the Lifehacker’s speed test. Although I’ve not used it, I hear SEObar for Opera is a good Opera extension.

That said Chrome is now my browser of choice. I like its contemporary feel, speediness, ease of syncing extensions and it does nearly everything I need for SEO. I still flip over to Firefox now and again but this is becoming less and less.