Pimp Your Firefox - SEO Extensions Edition

We all know Firefox provides a more useful browsing experience. More secure, complete with tabs and standards compliant, Firefox is just plain better.

But the best feature of Firefox has to be its extension capabilities, which allows third-party programmers the ability to customize Firefox with stuff left out by the developers. Nice!

For SEO, this means very, very good things. Here’s a list of extensions I can’t live without. And once you start using them, you won’t be able to, either.

• Google PageRank - Yea, yea, it’s dead. But you know you still need it. This one’s even better than the original because it provides a text number (no more mousing over to see if it’s an 8 or a 7).
• IE View - Adds a right click menu item that spawns an IE window with the current page you’re viewing. Very useful for CSS debugging.
• HTML Validator - Real time HTML error and warning reporting based on the W3C recommendations. If you care about clean and lean code, this one is a must. One of my favorites.
• ColorZilla - Gives you a color picker to find out the color of anything in your browser window. No more print screen / Photoshop pasting! Not really for SEO, but I love this one, nonetheless.
• SEOpen - Gives you right-click abilities to view cache, backlinks, etc., in Google, Yahoo! and MSN. You also get a link checker, headers, robots.txt, whois and much more. Very useful.
• Web Developer - If you create sites, this is the single most useful extension you will ever download. Live CSS editing(!), image dimensions, block sizes, outline elements, window resizing (no more switching display modes), validation and a handy view source button. And much more. Wow!
• Copy Plain Text - Have to copy something from a Web page and stick it in something else without the formatting? Well, open up notepad, paste it in, copy again, then paste again to strip it. No longer! Copy Plain Text does it for you, stripping all formatting like styles, fonts, etc.
• User Agent Switcher - Switch your user-agent and, umm, I don’t know, find cloaked pages, maybe? ;-)
• Customize Google - Uses Google Suggest in the default search box (useful for subconscious keyword mining even when you’re not actively doing SEO), adds competitor links, secures GMail, prevents Goog from tracking your userid, removes click tracking, links to archive history and more.
• Session Manager - Saves your Firefox session (open tabs) even when you close and reboot.
• miniT - Drag and move your open tabs around. Another useful utility.
• Copy URL + - copy URLs and more with this little handy plugin. The best part seems to be the customizing you can do to markup the content copied, making it very helpful for blogging.
• SEO Links - When enabled, hovering over any link in Firefox will show you Yahoo, MSN and Google link popularity and ranking data for the URL and anchor text pair.
• IE Tab - an extension from Taiwan, features embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox.
• MeasureIt - measure any area of your screen in pixels. No more opening Photoshop to paste screenprints!
• Flashblock - opt in to play flash movies. Very nice in preventing flash popups and hiding annoying banner ads.
• SEO for Firefox - Just. Plain. Excellent. Quite possibly the only tool you need for SEO market research. Provides information on the following: PR, age from archive.org, links from Yahoo!’s linkdomain, # of .edu domain links, # of .edu page links, # of .gov domain links, total # of page links, del.icio.us bookmarks, Technorati links, Alexa rank, # of pages cached in Google, DMOZ listing, Bloglines subscriptions, Yahoo! directory listing and WhoIs.
• DownThemAll! - allows you to download all the links on a page without clicking each one. Useful for logfiles, reports, or anything else you can think of.
• ShowIP - show the IP of the current site in the status bar.
• Greasemonkey - customize websites using JavaScript.
• Firebug - another Web developer extension. I really like the real-time editing capabilities of Firebug as opposed to the Web Developer toolbar.
• Header Spy - Shows HTTP headers in the status bar.
• FAYT - Bring back the missing “find as you type” “next” and “previous” buttons in FF2.

And while technically not an extension, be sure to run this hack to curb Firefox memory leaks (FF2 compatible).

If you have a useful addition you would like to see here, please contact me.