SEO for Firefox Review

SEO Book's SEO extension for Firefox is a free research tool that allows you to see SEO statistics at a glance while using Google and Yahoo! search engines. It gleans data from multiple sources and places a small info-bar beneath search engine results including: Google Page Rank, age of the web page, the number of links pointing to that page from different top-level domains (.edu, .gov, etc), social bookmarking counts, Alexa rating, and a place to easily see the WHOIS of that domain. It also provides links to a few tools that you may want to use, like Google Trends, the SEO Book Keyword Research Tool, and Google's Keyword Tool.

There are a few different settings you can use. One of the most-stressed features is the on-off button at the bottom of your browser. The creators say that you should only use it when you're actively researching a market because there's the possibility that you can get temporarily banned from your sources by scraping too much information and taking up their bandwidth. It's recommended that you set the delay to at least one second, but you may want to set it even higher to avoid annoying the people who are helping you. You can also select whether or not you want the information to display on all results automatically, or if you want to get it “on demand” by clicking on the link.

The SEO extension has recently been updated to work in Firefox 3, and it added compete.com's ratings to the output. The extension doesn't automatically update, but you can easily update it in the Firefox Extensions Menu. Future updates may include Digg listings, data caching, and a status indicator.

There are reports (on the main page and from other sources) of conflicts with other extensions that alter search engine listings. It's not that big of an issue unless you are absolutely attached to your extensions. Conflicts and errors like that are to be expected, and it's the price you pay for information at your fingertips. A solution to that problem could be to keep two versions of Firefox—one for research and one for regular web browsing.

This is definitely one tool you should add to your arsenal!

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