Blogging News

Wendy Ang asked:


The Mozilla Firefox has been one of the most widely used internet browser in the world competing with some of the most popular such as Internet Explorer and Safari. Though it was once as dormant as a sleeping dragon, Mozilla Firefox became the most popular web browser mainly because of its wide uses.

Mozilla Firefox does lack many features found in other browsers, but in an effort to combat interface bloat, developers made it to allow the browser to be shipped as a small, pared-down core which makes it customizable to meet individual users’ needs or interest.

The developers thought that instead of providing all features in the standard distribution; why not rely on the extension system to allow users to modify the browser according to their own preferences. This innovation made way to extensions and other add-ons that made Mozilla as an important tool for web development and Internet Marketing.

SEO is one of the many that benefited on this. Today, there are a lot of extensions and add-ons for Mozilla Firefox that is made specifically for the purpose of SEO and internet marketing.

Though there are many of them out there, there are only a selected few that made it into the essentials, which means the ones that really proved to be useful in an SEO or internet marketing campaign.

Here are the 3 Mozilla Firefox add-ons or extensions that have helped us in our SEO campaign:

#1 SEO for Firefox

A successful SEO tool coming from the famous SEOBook is SEO for Firefox. SEO for Firefox is a Mozilla Firefox extension used for gathering specific data about a site. These data are then used by webmasters to keep track if their sites are still on top shape, or retrieve information about their competitors. SEOBook has once again created a masterpiece.

According to their site, there are now over 130,000 webmasters who use SEO for Firefox for their SEO campaigns. This is because of the design of SEO for Firefox to grab every, single, information that can be found on a website. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data, this tool also provides links to the data sources so users can dig deeper into the data.

Here are the features that are commonly found in SEO for Firefox:





PR- the popular Google PageRank





Age- the age of the website from when it was first indexed by Archive.org





Links- Yahoo! Linkdomain that shows the total number of links pointing at a domain





.edu Link- Yahoo! .edu linkdomain that shows the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain





.edu Page Link- Yahoo! .edu link that shows the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page





.gov Link- Yahoo! .gov linkdomain that shows the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain





Page Links- Yahoo! Link that shows the total number of links pointing at a page





del.icio.us-  the number of times the site was bookmarked





Technorati- the number of links to a site from blogs





Alexa- the website’s traffic





Cached- shows the number of pages indexed in Google





DMOZ- counts the total number of pages listed in DMOZ and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.





Bloglines- shows the number of people subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.





dir.yahoo.com





WhoIs- makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.





With this complete information, webmasters could easy maintain and monitor their site, that is if it still fares up pretty well with competition or it might need more work.

Visit an SEO Philippines site to learn more about SEO tools used in an SEO campaign.

#2 SEO Quake

SEO Quake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. SEO Quake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.

Features that are commonly found on SEO Quake are:





PR for Google PageRank





Google Index





Yahoo! Links





Yahoo! Link Domain





MSN Index





Alexa Rank





WebArchive Age





Del.Icio.Us Index





WhoIs





Page Source





Robots.txt





Sitemap





Links for Internal Links and External Links





Keyword Density





The good thing about SEO Quake is that the toolbar is found directly on top of the page, not on the toolbar of the browser so as to avoid distorting the main page. It’s a cleverly designed transparent HTML block that normally appears minimized on upper-left corner of every page you load. Clicking on the maximize icon expands the bar displaying all the parameters. All the information displayed is in a short summarized format and individual items can be clicked on for detailed results through the corresponding Search Engine.

Learn more about Firefox tools used for SEO campaigns by visiting an SEO Philippines site.

#3 SEOpen

SEOpen is one of the many extensions or add-ons that are always present in a webmaster’s arsenal. Many consider that SEOpen is one of the most useful Firefox extensions ever developed, mainly because of its many benefits for their users. One of which is assistance for analyzing backlinks.

Though it is easy to type in “link:http://domain.com” in the search engine box, SEOpen makes this a lot easier by providing a convenient way for analyzing backlinks on all search engines. But not just backlinks, all features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar.

Here are the features commonly seen on SEOpen:





Yahoo Backlinks





Pages in Yahoo Index





Yahoo Domain links





Google Backlinks





Google Cache





Pages in Google index





Google Translate to English





Google Related





PageRank Checker





MSN Backlinks





Pages in MSN Index





MSN Domain links





Alexa Overview





Alexa Traffic





Alexa Related





Alexa Backlinks





“Mass Check” multiple sources at once for backlinks, indexed, and domain links





Check DMOZ Inclusion





Link analyzer





Keyword Density





Page Size Checker





HTML Validator





Server Header Viewer





Archives





Check robots.txt





Whois Info





Installing SEOpen is also as easy as it is used. Just download the add-on, and all will be ready for use. Just don’t forget to choose the version that is compatible with the version of Firefox. Currently, SEOpen is updated to be compatible for use in Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1.

Plans are also underway for future versions of SEOpen that may include:





Yahoo & MSN Cache





Spider Simulator and/or Text Browser view





IP-based SEO tools





Toolbar Option





Check out an SEO Philippines site if you want to learn more about the tools used for SEO, or just visit Optimind Technology Solutions at www.myoptimind.com for more details.

Jonathan Hook asked:

The elementary structure of search engines is programmed as such that it reacts in an extremely dynamic and result-oriented manner to fresh content.

The latest and highest quality updated content is what the search engines always crave for and react to the best.

Content and Search Engines

The key factor which makes blogging a beneficial web activity for search engines is that the search engines respond well to new content on a website or a weblog. In fact, the internet jargon labels “content as the king” from a search engine’s viewpoint.

Blogs provide one of the most simple, quick and easy methods of adding content to a website. Users don’t need to know HTML or web design techniques to add content if they do so through the medium of blogs.

Ready Information

Search engines also react marvelously well to mediums from where they can dish out ready information. Analysis of various news and information websites vis-a-vis weblogs has proven that the information content in blogs is more easily accessible than that in websites.

To explain further, search engines respond well to the blogs also because of the blogs unique relationship with the user and the content. If we talk about the pages sitting in an index, we are waiting for the search engine to visit and query the data. On the other hand, owing to the unique feed association, the user is right there, getting the data almost as soon as you create it.

RSS Feeds

Besides, RSS feeds have also shifted the choice of visible content. By using RSS feeds, blogs give visitors the ability to use blog aggregators such as Topix.net, Bloglines, Yahoo’s blog aggregator or a desktop tool such as FeedDemon.

This again works well for search engines. From the search point of view, you can go to Yahoo! and type your search term and simply find results. The site represented by those results has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to and read on a regular basis.

Default Structure

Most importantly, the inherent and basic search engine friendly nature of blogs is what gets the attention of search engine marketers. As we said earlier, blogs are easy to publish and tend to contain lots of fresh, keyword rich text.

Moreover, as many blogs are rendered as static HTML pages in standard compliant designs, all of this information is readily available for the search engine spiders.

To conclude, blogs provide a faster and qualitative access through the medium of search engines to an informed and interested audience. This in turn does well for the efficiency and abilities of the search engines.



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