The Search for the Ultimate SEO Browser Setup

In light of the recent news floating around the web that Internet Explorer’s market share has reached an all-time low (Techworld.com – Internet Explorer usage continues to fall), I thought I would share with you my own highs and lows as an SEO searching for the best browser set-up.

Up until the first release of the Google toolbar, I had always been a loyal Safari user. Safari’s speed, built-in RSS reader, and it’s pop-up blocker were all great selling points for me. But when the Google Toolbar was released, I was less than pleased to learn that they hadn’t released a version for Safari users. I found my way around it, as I outlined in Toolbars, Desktop Search and Mac Users, and was pleased with my setup until Google released the Toolbar for Firefox.

I downloaded and tried my hand with the Firefox browser. It was very fast, Open Source and incredibly customizeable with a myriad of add-ons, not just the Google Toolbar. But as an avid Apple user – some even refer to me as an Apple evangelist – it takes a lot more than just a Toolbar and some fancy buttons to pull me from my beloved Apple-made Safari. To me, it just wasn’t enough and I switched back to Safari.

Then, a couple of months ago, I read about a new browser, Flock. It had features galore, and a library full of add-ons to customize the application. As an avid blogger, what caught my attention was the built-in blog editor, so I downloaded the application and gave it a whirl. I fell in love and wrote about it: Amazing New Browser – Flock!

Soon enough I did realize there were some problems with Flock, though, such as the fact that it was a RAM hog, and because it is still in beta, it crashed often. But I continued to use it for it’s blogging features, Flickr integration, and the built-in newsreader.

Until yesterday. As I sifted through my RSS feeds, reading the latest in tech news, I saw a lot of people talking about the latest Firefox release. I read a lot of great reviews and decided to give Firefox another try. So I updated my older version of Firefox and sifted through the thousands upon thousands of add-ons and extensions for the program and finally found a setup that made my job as a blogger, an SEO and a business owner a lot easier. Here’s how I have it set-up:

1. I installed the extension called Performancing for blogging. This blog editor is far more powerful than the built-in blog tool for Flock and the Blogger button on the Google Toolbar. It also allows for the addition of technorati tags, saving posts as drafts or “notes”. You can blog with multiple blogs and multiple blogging platforms. It supports technorati searching to find out who links to your blog right in your editor. You can also sign up for a Performancing Metrics account to track your blog statistics and view them within your editor as well. It has a del.ici.ous tab with which you can post bookmarks to your del.ici.ous account. This tool also saves your blogging history so you can go back, read and make reference to previous articles you posted with Performancing. This is absolutely invaluable to an SEO, as any good search marketer knows how fruitful blogging can be, especially with the addition of technorati tags and del.ici.ous bookmarks.

For more info on Performancing, see the Firefox extension page or the Performancing web site.

2. Of all the different news reading add-ons you can get for Firefox, I find Sage to be, by far, the best. It is closest to Flock’s integrated newsreader, in that you can organize your feeds into different folders, but it exceeds it in it’s sheer speed and layout. I find that with a lot of newsreader extensions for Firefox, they slow the application down. Sage seems to make no difference whatsoever. Switching between feeds, closing or opening the Sage sidebar, or navigating away from your feeds are all done swiftly without even so much as a second of delay. Sage’s layout is easy-to-use, clean and reminds me a bit of Apple’s Mail application. It’s divided into 3 panels: one is a list of feeds, the next a list of posts in the selected feed and the third is either the actual feed page with descriptions of each item, or any web page you have navigated to while Sage is open. You can import any OPML file so you can keep track of the same feeds you do in any other newsreader without having to enter all the addresses again, and with the feed search tool you can alos find new feeds to add to your list – something that is quite dangerous for me, being as I already devote much of my life to reading RSS feeds. This tool helps me in the search engine optimization industry by keeping me up-to-date with such blogs as the Official Google Blog, MSN, Yahoo! and Matt Cutts’ blog about Google and search. It keeps me informaed about where the industry is headed, what new techniques people are using and it gives me one heck of a lot of fodder to post to Gridlock or Groupthink about. And as all good SEOs know, content is king.

For more information on Sage, visit the Sage extension page or the Sage web site.

3. There are a lot of Firefox extensions out there to help search engine marketers, and yes, I downloaded and tried them all. Of course. But I find there are only two SEO tools available for Firefox that are really worth it. The first is, obviously, the Google Toolbar. MSN and Yahoo! have released toolbars as well, but we all know the search engine to conquer is Google being as it has a majority market share that just keeps growing. The value of seeing the Pagerank of every page you navigate to is immeasureable.

The second tool I find useful is the SEOpen Toolbar. This gives you drop-down menus with which you can view the backlinks, the indexed pages, translation of the page, the Pagerank and much much more, for Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Alexa. It also allows you to check all of this at once with the Mass Check tool. On top of this there is another drop down menu that features other tools such as a DMOZ check, a link analyzer, a keyword density anlayzer, HTML Validator, Whois and a lot more. While there are other extensions that let you do a lot of this with even more, such as meta tag analyzers, etc. they tend to take up a lot more valuable browsing real estate, and/or they don’t work entirely well.

For more info on the SEOpen Toolbar, please see the SEOpen Toolbar extension page or the SEOpen web site.

4. This is an absolutely great tool. Called LinkChecker, when selected, it checks the links on the page you’re viewing to see if they all work. Simple but incredibly handy.

More info on the LinkChecker extension page or the LinkChecker web site.

5. Many of you in the SEO industry know how tedious it can be to submit your clients web sites to directory after directory. Copy/paste, copy/paste and so on and so forth. I have found a few tools in the past that has help made this process a little faster such as the Scribbler widget for the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Snippets for Flock, and a few more that help with the copying of multiple items. However, for Firefox there are two great extensions that go above and beyond just simple copying and pasting multiple items. InFormEnter is much like autofill in that it will fill out entire forms for you, but with a few extras. You can organize different form information into different profiles – so useful for the SEO who works with multiple clients, multiple web sites and multiple submission details. You can also add your own fields. In other words, unlike Autofill, InFormEnter is not limited to name, phone, address and email. You can add your web site descriptions, URLs, keywords, and anything else under the sun you find yourself having to enter repeatedly into web forms.

For more information on InFormEnter visit the InFormEnter extension page or the InFormEnter web site.

A similar tool is called Clippings. It adds a small button to your status bar in Firefox and allows you to organize endless clippings into Folders. This can be great for quoting other web sites, keeping notes, and filling in the same form information over and over much like InFormEnter.

For more information on Clippings, visit the Clippings extension page or the Clippings web site.

6. The last few extensions are just for fun, but still examples of how versataille Firefox really is. Pickup is and extension that allows you to upload and tag photos to your photo sharing account, such as Flickr, and FoxyTunes is an extension that allows you to operate iTunes from within your browser window.

More info on Pickup. More info on FoxyTunes.

There are a lot of other great things about Firefox, such as the ability to change the look of the program with different themes, it’s lightning fast compared to IE or Flock, it supports tabbed browsing, organization of bookmarks and of course, it’s Open Source. But as an SEO, nothing at all compares to the tools available for it. This setup in Firefox can literally shave my work time in half. And all of it is available for both Windows and Mac users.

Discuss your favorite browser setup and/or Firefox extensions in our forums: Groupthink.