Optimizing with Firefox

One piece of software any optimizer should love is Firefox. Now some may say "Why Firefox, it's only a browser?" Yes, it's a browser, but one that supports a big variety of plugins, some of them very useful for search engine optimization. So let's see what those plugins are:

1. SEOpen ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/570/ ): this is one of the best and most used Firefox seo plugins, and has many tools that make it a favorite of mine. So let's see what it can do:

* in Google it can check for: backlinks, indexed pages, related pages, cache and PageRank.
* in Yahoo and MSN: backlinks and indexed pages.
* for Alexa: overview, traffic details, backlinks and related sites.
* keyword density of the most used words on the page.
* DMOZ checker: see if the site is included in the directory.
* check for robots.txt.
* validator to check your page for errors (it uses the validator from www.w3.org).

There are other things, but these are the most important.

2. SEO Links ( http://www.webmasterbrain.com/seo-tools/firefox-extensions/seo-links/ ) is another extension I use everyday. When the extension si active and you hover over a link a tooltip will appear that will show you Yahoo, MSN, and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair. When you're simply browsing this can be annoying, but you can simply deactivate it with a right-click!

This could be very easily used to check your search engine rankings for a certain page, and here is how: write up a list with all the keywords and keyphrases that you want to rank for, and then link those words or phrases to the web pages associated with them!

Now every time you want to check your ranks activate the SEO Links extension and hover over the links -- you will see where your pages are in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

3. Don't waste anymore of your precious screen real estate just to find out what your PageRank and AlexaRank is! SearchStatus ( https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/321/ ) can sit anywhere you want (I keep it in the status bar) and you'll receive the precious info at a glance. But this little tool can do a lot more than that:

* it shows what metatags a site has
* checks for backlinks and indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and MSN
* it shows the robots.txt file
* keyword density report function
* and best of all: the highlight "nofollow" links will show you what links will be followed by search engine spiders -- very useful when you want to submit your site to a directory and don't know if it will matter from a seo perspective.

So in case you're not using Firefox, go get it! It could be your best friend when it comes to search engine optimization!

Florin Costache writes on a daily seo blog for Romanian webmasters, called Optimizare pentru motoarele de cautare (a.k.a. search engine optimization for those who don't speak Romanian).

Search Engine Wars: Google Thumps Yahoo, MSN

Well the score is in: Google has resoundingly thumped Yahoo and MSN in the ongoing search engine wars. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t read it myself; Google continues to grow in size and popularity while Yahoo and MSN continue to firm up their “also ran” positions. What does this mean for you? Plenty, especially if you are wasting your time with the other search engines.

Yes, I am surprised. My previous statistics were evidently a bit outdated as I had the search engine war between the Big 3 Providers -- Google, Yahoo, and MSN -- running a tight 1-2-3. Indeed, it must have been early in 2005 the last time I bothered to look at the statistics, but at that time my stats showed that Google controlled 36% while Yahoo and MSN were running at 33% and 32% respectively. Yes, the statistics total to more than 100% since they include those people who use more than one search engine [in this case they are counted twice].

According to the Neilsen//NetRatings and as republished in the October 20, 2005, issue of USAToday, Google’s share is as follows:

Google is the Internet's most-used search engine, with a 45.1% share of searches in September, according to market tracker Nielsen/NetRatings. Yahoo (YHOO) had 23.3% and MSN 11.7%, says Nielsen.

To put it bluntly, only Yahoo is in the game and MSN is quickly fading to irrelevancy. How can I say this? Because when I do searches of key words that I frequently check up on including, Corporate Flight Attendant Community, I find some vastly different results.

With MSN, the search results yielded 3117 results, with Yahoo 326, and with Google 9850. What is apparent to me is that Google is doing the best job of indexing pages while the other two are way behind. I will give MSN credit for the recent leap in the number of results for Corporate Flight Attendant Community, but several of the results were for pages I deleted months, even years ago! Overall, I believe Yahoo harnesses their popular Yahoo Groups, Hotjobs, and other key features to give them a search engine edge over MSN.

I am betting my money on Google. While it isn’t good for one search engine to dominate, when it comes to building my business I want to go with a winner. Clearly, Google has a leg up on the competition, so every page that I create is optimized for my buddy Googlebot to index!

Do you, Yahoo? I don't... now you understand why.