
For those not familiar with the Mozilla Firefox web browser or its ridiculous amount of add-ons, it’s a very powerful browser that, with the right plugins, can be one of the best tools in your SEO arsenal.
Many of the SEO folks I know have switched to Chrome completely, claiming that can do everything SEO-related via Google’s browser. While that’s fine, I personally prefer to leave Chrome “unplugged” and not install any add-ons/plugins to retain a clean and simplistic web browsing experience. So I tend to use Chrome as my default browser and Firefox for SEO purpose. You could call Firefox my “ugly” browser as it has LOTS of add-ons that allow me to quickly analyse websites and very quickly and easily build to-do lists and recommendations of what either myself or the web developer I’m working with needs to do to optimise a site.
So, without further ado, here is my list of 12 must-have Firefox add-ons for SEO. I use plenty more (and let me tell you, there are literally hundreds of thousands of them available!) but wanted to share only the best. Enjoy!
Web Developer Tool Bar
- Users: >1 million
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/
Autofill Forms
- Users: >120 thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/autofill-forms/
Firebug
- Users: >3.1 million
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/
Flagfox
- Users: > 1.4 million
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flagfox/
GA?
- Users: > 5 thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ga-is-google-analytics-install/
Live HTTP Headers
- Users: >240 thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/live-http-headers/
Page Speed
Helps to optimise the performance of your website by identifying best practices and recommendations that you can apply. Recommendations such as enabling gZip compression, minifying CSS, optimising images and more. Simply run the tool and you’re presented with a “Page Speed Score” out of 100 as well as a list of actionables that link to how-to guides written by Google’s engineers on how to improve them. SEO aside, a faster page leads to higher visitor engagement, retention and conversions – which is what you’re aiming for at the end of the day.
SearchStatus
- Users: >54 thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/searchstatus/
- Highlight nofollow Links – with this option enabled, all links and images on your webpage that are labelled as rel=”nofollow” will be highlighted a transparent pink colour. Great for quickly identifying the types of links on a website whether they be internal or external.
- Link Report – shows you the total amount of links on the page including internal, external, followed external, nofollow and secure.
- Meta Data – quickly analyse the page’s meta data including title, robots information, description, keywords, geo-data, google-site-verification and more.
- Show other domains on IP – opens up a new tab in the Bing search engine and shows a list of all the other domains on the same IP address.
- Show in Archive.org – opens a new tab in the Wayback machine which saves you from having to go there and entering the info manually.
- Show Whois – shows you the Whois information for the domain using DomainTools.com, Whois-search.com, DNSstuff.com or Who.is (you can set which one you prefer in the options – I use DomainTools).
- Show robots.txt – flicks open a new tab and loads the /robots.txt file should there be one present.
- Show sitemap.xml – as above, except shows the website’s XML sitemap.
- Show Keyword Density – simply type in your keyword you’re returned with a % figure of its keyword density.
- Highlight Keywords – type in your keyword and then see it highlighted wherever it exists on the page.
Semantic Checker
- Users: > 450
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/semantic-checker/
Server Spy
- Users: > 11thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/server-spy/
ShowIP
- Users: > 148thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/showip/
User-Agent Switcher
- Users: > 570thousand
- Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/
As I mentioned earlier in the post, there are some others I use such as SEOquake, the Mozbar, SEO for Firefox etc but as they’re a little more advanced I’ve tried to steer away from them in this post. What add-ons or plugins do you use and recommend? Drop a line in the comments and I’ll update this post accordingly.
Happy analysing! 🙂