You’ll have no doubt been working one day and asked yourself, “There must be a simpler way to do this”. You’re right, there probably is, in the form of a Firefox add-on. There are thousands of add-on’s to choose from for Firefox, some are useful, some are pointless, and many you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.
For SEO purposes, Firefox add-on’s are a programmers heaven. There are dozens of useful add-on’s for SEO in the Mozilla database. A few of SEO Consult’s favourites are listed below with a description of their use. Try them out, you won’t be disappointed!
Firebug – This tool is not just one for the SEO programmer, but also for any website developer too. It gives you a small icon in the status bar which when clicked brings up a console style window. Inside is a multitude of tools designed to help you diagnose and repair broken web pages. By far the most useful feature is the ability to edit and monitor on the fly changes of CSS, HTML and JavaScript live on any web page. This is far quicker than editing a page, uploading and refreshing.
Live HTTP Headers – This tool shows you the headers served up from the web server so you can see if there are any redirects in them, such as 301 or 302 redirects. It will also show you if there are any elements not found with a 404 error. 302’s and 404’s are like the plague to Google, and they won’t get indexed. Use this tool to help you identify and remove them.
Server Spy – This is a basic but very useful tool to tell you which version of Apache, IIS or other web server software the server hosting the website is running. This is especially useful if you need to know whether you can use an htaccess file or not, or see if a script is likely going to be compatible with the website or not.
HTML Validator – Tired of the W3C Validator being so slow? We were too, so we installed this tool which uses a very close algorithm to the W3C Validator to help us diagnose HTML/XHTML errors. The tool installs itself to the status bar where it displays the number of errors on each page you load automatically. Double clicking brings up the source code window and the validator console for your diagnosis. When all the errors are repaired, finish off with a check using the W3C Validator to be sure, as the algorithms aren’t identical. A validated page is a good looking page to Google.
Web Developers Toolbar – This is by far the most useful tool any web or SEO programmer can use. The variety of features included is huge, and it allows you to do hundreds of things you would normally crawl through browser menus to do. Some examples are outlining elements, disabling images and JavaScript, viewing the CSS file, disabling CSS, resizing the browser window, view the source code and page headers… The list is almost endless. Ease of use and compatibility is a large factor in conversion rates, so make sure your website works the way it should.
Now you have some useful tools, install them and see how well they help you. And remember, they’re all free and get regularly updated. From an SEO perspective, you can increase your throughput by a long way with these simple tools.
