The most important SEO plugins for your browser

Little programs that make a big dif­fer­ence: SEO toolbars, browser plugins and add-ons are helpful tools for everyday marketing. They support ad­ver­tis­ers across a number of dis­ci­plines in search engine op­ti­miza­tion. Whether you’re analyzing website per­for­mance or eval­u­at­ing link profiles, with the right SEO browser plugins, you can save yourself some stress and cut some corners while making sure your SEO activity is as effective as possible. We’ll introduce you to the best tools to help you improve your SEO with simple browser plugins and ex­ten­sions.

The Google Chrome equiv­a­lent of Firefox Developer Tools (Firebug) is the ‘Web Developer’ extension by Google. This is a more tra­di­tion­al SEO add-on, with a complete range of functions that gives the web developer control of all areas of a website. With the click of a button, you can activate or de­ac­ti­vate numerous functions of each loaded web page, like the cache function, JavaScript, meta redi­rec­tions, or colors. The Web Developer add-on also allows you to display used Cookies, which can be deleted or changed. The CSS tools available offer users the chance to edit every stylesheet on their website. Web Developer offers countless other features too, making it a must for Google Chrome users and much more than just an SEO tool.

• Tool for web de­vel­op­ers
• Great for technical op­ti­miza­tion and im­prove­ment of the user ex­pe­ri­ence
• Extensive functions that more than suffice for SEO beginners
• Available for Google Chrome
• Free to download

Linkpars­er is a useful little tool for analyzing link structure. The plugin offers 9 different link types (e.g. intern/extern, follow/nofollow). You can check out the number of relevant links as a preview in the browser – before then de­ter­min­ing which link types are actually displayed by the tool. One click on the browser symbol will highlight all the cor­re­spond­ing links that you’re planning to display.

• Ideal for op­ti­miza­tion of internal link structure
• Free SEO browser plugin
• Available for Firefox and Chrome

This analysis tool from Moz.com will be familiar to many users with previous SEO ex­pe­ri­ence, as it’s one of the most popular and trusted SEO plugins. The Moz toolbar au­to­mat­i­cal­ly displays different metrics for off-page analysis every time you load a web page. This includes (among other things) what’s known as the Moz Rank (an in-house code that measures the link pop­u­lar­i­ty of a web page), page authority, domain authority, and the number of backlinks. Along with the toolbar, MozBar also offers an ‘Overlay’, which can be found by clicking on the Moz symbol. Here, you can find further in­for­ma­tion about page elements and at­trib­ut­es (URL, title, meta de­scrip­tion, main heading, etc.) and use this as a basis for carrying out on-page analysis and op­ti­miza­tion later on. The toolbar and Overlay aside, Moz even displays relevant link data under search results.

• Suitable for analysis of potential partner sites or com­pe­ti­tion
• Enables a quick, rough off-page analysis and brief on-page analysis
• Free version and extended pro version
• Free to download for Firefox and Chrome

The SEOquake toolbar is another es­tab­lished plugin in the SEO scene and offers similar functions to MozBar. The tool delivers all relevant metrics for in­di­vid­ual pages (e.g. PageRank) for all available search engines. Users can access in­for­ma­tion like link profiles, titles, meta de­scrip­tions, and meta keywords with the click of a mouse. SEOquake offers a number of in­di­vid­ual settings available and a great range of general functions. Many useful ad­di­tion­al functions are available, like an in­te­grat­ed Whois query to give you in­for­ma­tion on the owner and server location of a web page, and access to a web archive that displays the page in all its previous versions.

• A classic SEO plugin
• Useful tool for a rough SEO website analysis
• Free to download for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera

The Majestic SEO browser plugin focuses more on backlinks. All relevant figures like backlink figures, values, strengths, and trust factors are taken care of. In order to manage all this, the Majestic tool relies on a huge backlink database. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly practical for the user: all important values can be vi­su­al­ized and clearly displayed with the click of a mouse.

• Tool for offpage analysis
• Well suited for beginner’s backlink analysis
• Free download for Chrome und Firefox

A very important (technical) ranking factor is the loading time of a page. Op­ti­miz­ing what’s known as your page speed can be achieved very easily through the Google tool PageSpeed Insights. As a result of the mobile boom and the ac­com­pa­ny­ing growth in relevance for loading times on mobile devices, this tool is in­cred­i­bly valuable for any web page operator. Although this isn’t presently available as a browser plugin, using this online tool (available via the Google Web Developer Tools page) allows you to carry out web page analyses directly in your browser.

• Tool for advanced SEO experts or web de­vel­op­ers
• Useful for loading time op­ti­miza­tion
• Online tool that can be used for free as part of the Google Webmaster tools col­lec­tion

The SEO add-on Seerobots checks a website for its ‘robots’ meta tags. For back­ground in­for­ma­tion, ‘robots’ tags are useful for websites that are being built or currently un­der­go­ing main­te­nance. In cir­cum­stances like these, web operators usually try to avoid being indexed by Google until every­thing is finished and meets the search engine’s guide­lines. As a result, pro­gram­mers use the meta tag ‘robots’ with the at­trib­ut­es ‘noindex’ or ‘nofollow’, to let the GoogleBot know that the page shouldn’t be indexed. After a page or website is fully updated and ready to be indexed by Google, this tool helps to maintain an overview of the indexing procedure by marking pages with colored tags.

• Tool for a quick meta tag check
• Helps to identify typical errors and quickly repair them
• Free to download for Chrome and Firefox

The ex­ten­sions listed above are quick to install and simplify your daily SEO work con­sid­er­ably. But be aware: If you install too many different plugins and SEO toolbars, you’ll be literally unable to view the browser clearly anymore for the sheer number of ex­ten­sions. But para­dox­i­cal­ly, the best way to make sure you always keep your focus on the es­sen­tials could be to install one more add-on: the One Click Extension Manager (only available for Chrome) can tidy up your ex­ten­sions, turning unused ones off or making them invisible with the click of a button, meaning you don’t need to continue scrolling through menus to keep your browser looking clean.