My Personal Finance Journey said:
Mike – Saving Money Today said:
I've been using the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox for a long time and I love it. (sometimes I just assume everyone knows about these things already!)
Just glad I could finally contribute Barb! Yeah! I'm definitely hooked on this plugin!
Any other little tools you use for SEO Mike that you would recommend?
Not necessarily for SEO, but some of the things I take for granted are:
1. SEO Quake, very useful
2. Someone recently mentioned linking your Adsense and Analytics accounts. That's really good for seeing which pages generate the most revenue.
3. Screengrab is a good Firefox plugin for saving all or parts of a screen. You can then use them in your posts, helpful when trying to write a review or demonstration.
4. Image optimizer will shrink the size of your image files to improve your site's loading speeds. You can shrink the file size without giving up much visually.
5. Google webmaster tools. Tons of valuable information.
6. Yahoo's Site Explorer is being phased out, but it's useful for seeing who is linking to your competitors. Then you can try and get a link from the same place. Works especially well with SEO Quake because you can see the stats on those links too.
7. Keyword research! I've seen a couple of posts where people mention they don't do any research at all. I assumed everyone was already doing it! I think it's really important if you want to get traffic from the search engines. I used to use Google's keyword tool and SEO Quake and I was doing pretty well, but a few months back I started using Market Samurai and since then my traffic has gone up and so has the percentage coming from SE's. MS is a little pricey, but in another thread someone mentioned Traffic Travis was good too. Not sure how much that is…but to me it's worth spending a little if it helps my revenue grow.
8. Browser Shots…not vital but kind of cool to see how different your site looks depending on which browser your visitor is using. Would be useful to know if your site is unintelligible when viewed with a particular browser.
I'm sure there are other tools that I'm not thinking of off the top of my head…but hey you just gave me an idea for a blog post!