Easy Competition Research with SEO for Firefox

One of the first tasks for search engine optimization is understanding the nature of the competition. The SEO for Firefox extension offered by SEObook offers an easy way to analyze competing websites. It is, in several ways, a more user friendly version of Golexa.

The cool thing about this extension is the way it adds its results directly to the webpage of Google and Yahoo results. Here’s how it works:

1. Once installed, a little SEO icon appears in the lower right status bar of Firefox. It should be gray at this point.
2. Click on the icon and it should turn to a color version. SEO for Firefox is now on. Note per SEOBook: Only use this extension when doing market research. Having it on during general surfing will slow down your surfing plus unnecessarily ping a number of websites.
3. Go to Google or Yahoo.
4. Conduct a search for a keyword phrase. Choose phrases you have identified in previous keyword analysis. Using SEO for Firefox helps address the competitiveness of those keyword phrases.
5. Once the results of the search have been returned you will notice something different. Below the listing of each result is a line of various names and numbers. The tool is going out and querying various websites to assess the strength of each listing in a variety of categories.
6. What SEO for Firefox assesses:
   • PageRank – what is the page’s Google Page Rank.
   • Age – how old is the domain name. Older domain names tend to rank better.
   • Links – how many backlinks to main domain of this site. Greater backlinks means more competitive.
   • edu links – how many links from .edu sites point to the main domain. It is to a sites advangtage to have .edu links.
   • edu page links – similar to above, but instead of the main domain, it assess how many .edu sites point to this specific page.
   • gov links – links from .gov sites.
   • page links – how many links to this specific page.
   • de.icio.us – how many people have added this site to their de.icio.us bookmarks.
   • technorati – how many links from blogs
   • alexa – rank based on website traffic
   • cached – how many pages are indexed by google.
   • dmoz – the total number of pages listed in DMOZ
   • bloglines – how many people are subscribed to the site via Bloglines.
   • dir.yahoo.com – whether the site is in the yahoo directory.
   • whois – easy link to view whois data

All of this data can be used to assess the general competiveness of keyword phrases.

Other items I would like to see included/excluded:

• Instead of Google PageRank, integrate with the new PageStrength tool from SEOmoz. No one really knows what goes into PageRank. However, SEOmoz provides the formula behind PageStrength.
• The number of allinanchor keyword phrases that actually point to this page on this site.
• Some form of exporting data. A little export button by each link. Ideally, export to a CSV file that could be included into a master spreadsheet.
• Data from other social bookmarking sites. Maybe an aggregate from several. Others to include: Digg, StumbleUpon.