The SEO Series: Firefox for “Web Marketers”

Firefox is not just a browser. It is a powerful tool every web developer, in any department, should use.

Why Firefox and not Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer, or the newest Google Chrome?
The answer is simple: Because it is a fast and stable browser which can be highly customized to simplify your experience on the internet, no matter of your type of work. Thousands of programmers dedicated their time to create plugins which can enable more interaction between the users and the web.

Here is a list of 15 plugins which I use with my everyday work and I recommend to every web marketer:

Greasemonkey

This plugin extremely simplifies my work. It allows you to modify a web page you are viewing with simple JavaScript programming. Modifications will be visible only for you and every time you visit the web page. I use this plugin to customize Google  Analyitcs and to obtain valuable information from the SEO point of view.

The awesomeness in using this plugin is that I’m not programming all my customizations. There are libraries hosting thousands of possible customization which you can easily add to your Firefox. Some people are using this plugin just for fun, to change the logo of Google for example with any other name but keeping the same font-face.

The scripts I use are the following:

Nofollow Script – allows you to automatically view links with “no-follow”.

Google Analytics Report Enhancer – “Helps” Google Analytics to offer much more data than usual.

Multiple Profile in Google Analytics – changes the Google Analytics profile but keeps the reports which you are currently viewing.

Keyword trends in Google Analytics – offers a customized report of the keywords with the top results in the past 7 days.

Column Sorting in Google Analytics (dutch) – very useful in comparing results from Google Analytics on a segment selected by you.

Show all profiles in Google Analytics – allows you to view all the Google Analyitcs profiles in one page. By default only 10 are displayed.

Firebug

This plugin is used with predilection by web programmers, but if your work is Web Marketing is as good as it gets. For sure you handle HTML pretty well, so when it comes to solving problems caused by buggy source codes, this plugin will help you with lots of important information about the layout and SEO.

I use this plugin bundled with two other add-ons:

1. Pixel Perfect allows me to overlay an image sent by the designer on the layout developed by the programmers, so I can easily find any differences.
2. Yslow allows me to measure the load time of a web page and helps me to find the causes which can slow down a loading process.

Measureit

It’s one of my top plugin on my plugin list. Allows you to measure any surface on your display in pixels. It is very easy to use and it’s one of the favorite plugins used by many designers.

NoScript

This plugin allows you to deactivate any javascripts on a web page and to activate them only by a request. Once activated, remembers your settings. Although the porpoise of this plugin is to offer security for the user, but I personally use it to test and view web pages without javascript functionality.

This plugin is used by many users over the internet, so I warmly recommend to optimize your next web pages for  ‘non-javascript’ users too.

ScreenGrab

This plugin is also used by many web designers, allows you grab a screenshot of a webpage and save it in .png format. It has three saving options: save a selected portion of a web page, save only the visible portion of the web page, save the entire web page (FULL height – no scrollbars).

Secure Login

I use this plugin for security reasons. If a login process has the possibility of a secure connection, this plugin will automatically select the secure connection.

Seo Link Analysis

Seo Link Analysis was developed by Joost da Valk and it is aimed for Google Webmaster Tools or Yahoo Site Explorer users.  This plugin is displaying Page Ranks for all the pages linking to a web site. It allows me to see which links are valuable, which links have the No Follow attribute or which link wasn’t indexed.

Stumbleupon Toolbar

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking community. The Firefox toolbar (there is a version for Internet Explorer too) will allow you to easily add an article or a web page to your profile, will let you send it to all your friends, and allows you to search in your friend’s link collections or in the whole community link collection. This community is very valuable for web marketers and designers.

Update Scanner

This plugin allows you to follow updates on your competition’s websites. You will be notified every time there is an update on the defined sites.

WASP

I will totally marry this toolbar made by Stephan Hamel (Immeria). It allows me to follow all the advanced customizations of Google Analytics and to check for all the information sent from a website to Google Analytics or any other advanced traffic analytics service with ease.

Web Developer

This plugin, as the above mentioned Firebug, allows you to debug the source code of a website. My favorite functionality is disabling the images on a webpage (very useful in creating newsletters) and the resizing of the Firefox window to any resolution. This plugin was in the first three plugins I’ve ever installed to Firefox.

Remove Cookie

This plugin allows you to delete cookies for a specified web page on the internet. It is very useful, especially when testing for session and cookie errors on a website.

Google UnPersonalized

People in the SEO business will find this plugin very useful. It allows you to see Google search results by de-activating the customized results.

User Agent Switcher

This plugin allows you to change the user agent of Firefox to internet explorer or any other possible agent. In other words, you will easily see if a website displays different content for a search engine agent for example or different content for internet explorer. For those who don’t want to install this plugin, I recommend the following website which does the same thing: http://web-sniffer.net/.

Google Analytics Goal Copy

This plugin allows you to install a toolbar where you can save up to 4 Google Analytics Goals. It is helpful when you create a new profile and want to set up the same goals as on another profile, you can do this by only 4 clicks. It is very easy to use and to set up, especially for websites where I have more than 20 profiles.

This is my humble list of plugins for Web Marketing. What do you recommend?

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