Online Marketing Blog

[Note from Lee: We tend to get a bit heavy on the industry observations and strategy, so a nice tactics/tools post is in order. ]

There are many different tools out there for SEO’s to use on a website. Each one has different features and benefits depending on how you use them. That’s why TopRank provides SEO Tool Reviews from time to time. We showcase different tools that you may or may not know about. Some free, some paid, all good.

The basis of this SEO tool review is Firefox. “Firefox a SEO tool”, you say? Alone, Firefox is not an SEO tool, but there are many extensions and toolbars that can be added to Firefox to extend it’s possibilities past basic web browsing.

What makes Firefox so great?

Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was WordPress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

With the recent announcement of the slimmed down version of Technorati, s.technorati.com, my use of the blog search engine is on the increase once again. Now I’ve made it even easier to access by creating sTechnorati.

sTechnorati is a search plugin that works in both IE7 and Firefox 2. It’s actually built with the OpenSerch technology so as browsers adopt to that, they too can install sTechnorati. What it will do is install an option to search from your browsers built in search box and go directly to the s.technorati.com search results page. Just like the Google option that is already there now.

While making sTechnorati I took a few liberties. It’s set to search only English posts and posts with at least a little authority. I felt that would bring back the best results. If you want one with different settings, just ask and I’ll toss a new one together.

With the launch of Firefox 2 yesterday, one of the nice improvements came with how the browser interacts with feeds. Instead of the default source code view that Firefox 1 showed, Firefox 2 how gives users a nicer layout and the ability to add the feed to their favorite feed reader.

No longer is a raw feed seen as ‘scary’ by the average user and, with feed reader integration, it might help more people get into reading feeds without really knowing it. I think Firefox 2 will help people figure out feeds & feed readers on their own rather than try and understand how they work first.

Apple’s Safari has been doing this for over a year now and I think that IE7 also handles feeds better. This is just one step in helping the general public understand feeds & feed readers.

One of the things that bugs me about WordPress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

Aaron Wall announced in his “Above the Fold” newsletter yesterday the launch of a new SEO tool for Firefox. He also posted about SEO for Firefox on his SEOBook blog, generating a TON of feedback.

Says Aaron, “This tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market.”

The tool allows you to perform various SEO research functions as you search Google or Yahoo – which is very different than the toolbar and right click options offered by tools like SEOpen. With SEO for Firefox, after each search result you’ll see a variety of information for each URL ranging from age of domain name to .edu & .gov links to del.ico.us and dmoz info. The SEO for Firefox tool can be toggled on or off universally, plus there are settings for each data point.

Google has started promoting Firefox on its homepage. If you are running IE, head over to Google.com and you should see an ad that says “Firefox with Google Toolbar: tabbed browsing, safer surfing” with an image of the Google toolbar in Firefox under that.

According to the Firefox team. “Firefox is the first third party product to be featured on Google‚Äôs homepage.”

The bond between Google and Firefox seems to be getting stronger. This can only mean great things for the browser on all platforms in the future.

So, what does Google do with toolbar data?

-Thomas

Thomas here and I just wanted to let you all know that I’ve released a Firefox extension called yExplore to quickly access the Yahoo Site Explorer.

Back in September Yahoo released their site explorer and it’s quite a handy little tool. However, I wanted quicker access to the tool so I created the yExplore Firefox extension. It simply allows you to right click on any web page, select yExplore and it’ll open Yahoo Site Explorer in a background tab with the URL already submitted.

A few more details are available at my yExplore Extension page or you can get yExplore from the Mozilla site.

Traffic, everyone wants it and is trying really hard to get more people to their site. Good news, there are creative ways to bring people in without doing a lot of work.

1) Social Bookmarking. It’s been around long enough that some people know all about it and have a tendency to just search del.icio.us or Furl for what they want. Social sites are basically like a user defined search engine. Are you listed? Make sure to bookmark yourself every now and then and add social bookmark links to your blog posts and/or web pages so others can bookmark you too.