The 10 Best Firefox Plug-ins for SEO and Web Dev

While many an Internet marketer has migrated over to Google Chrome, we here at VUDU Marketing still prefer Firefox. Why? Well, aside from the fact that we’ve used it and loved it forever, the excellent plug-ins that are available are the real selling point.

Here are our 10 favorite SEO and Web Dev related plug-ins for Firefox:

1. Rank Checker – Exactly as the name says, this rank checking tool from SEO Book is one of the best, not to mention easy to use. While we use other software tools to track ranks, we use this primarily for our initial keyword research process to see where a client is currently ranking. Exports nicely to Excel.
2. mozBar – SEOmoz, being the wizards of SEO that they are, have created a phenomenal tool. It provides more features than we can mention, particularly allowing you to quickly navigate to the SEOmoz tools from any page. Also provides PageRank, mozRank and Domain Authority at a glance, amongst other things.
3. SEO Quake – This tool has a ton of awesome features, but one of our favorites is the quick keyword density tool. Nice to see how a search engine sees keywords on the page, and can help to ensure a clear winner keyword. Make sure to leave this tool OFF when you use a search engine…it can get your IP temporarily blocked 🙂
4. SEO for Firefox – Another awesome tool from SEO Book. SEO for Firefox has a ton of great features, but our favorite is the SEO X-Ray tool. Gives you a quick view of the Title and Metas on a page, and highlights H tags, ALT tags and a handful of others. Make sure to leave this tool OFF when you use a search engine…it can get your IP temporarily blocked 🙂
5. Firebug – There is no quicker way to get a fast look at the code of a particular part of a site, to check for validation errors, and to test changes to the HTML and CSS. There are a ton of other plug-ins that integrate with Firebug that expand the features exponentially.
6. HTML Validator – We set ours to SGML Parser, and it allows you to quickly check HTML and CSS validation of a page or site against W3C.
7. SearchStatus – The killer plug-in, by Quirk, has a ton of features. Some of the more useful ones are: highlighting keywords and nofollow links, showing keyword density, quickly showing indexed pages on the various search engines, and showing PR, Alexa, Compete and mozRank for each page.
8. IE Tab Plus – This one allows you to switch between a Firefox window and an IE window, all within Firefox. Excellent for checking web pages for cross-browser compatibility. Also nice for using the rare site that only works in one or the other.
9. MeasureIt – This is a great tool for quickly checking the height or width of an object or column on a web page.
10. User Agent Switcher – Last but not least, this handy tool allows you to view web pages exactly as the various search engine bots see them. It’s great for finding text to code issues, and for identifying user agent specific content switching (a black hat SEO technique).

And that’s it, our 10 favorite plug-ins. We’ve tried a number of others, but we use these 10 the most by a pretty hefty margin. If there’s a particular plug-in you think us and our users should be aware of, please tell us in the comments!