SEO Toolbar by SEO Book

There are so many toolbars, greasemonkey plugins, and Firefox add-ons for analysing websites that I don’t even get excited when a new one comes along. In all honesty think that too many toolbars can actually slow down my workflow. Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you need to! [Having said that, I’ve got 62 extensions installed in my Firefox :-) ]

Most SEO extensions currently available are good in some aspects but lack one feature or another. For the past few days I have been testing Aaron Wall’s new SEO Toolbar, and I have to admit that I’m very impressed with its features. Finally I’m a step closer to getting rid of my extensive list of extensions - the SEO Toolbar offers almost all research data/metrics that I need to analyse a website effectively.

Some of the features introduced in the toolbar were already available on the SEOBook Tools website, but it’s good to have them handy in a toolbar.

What’s in it?

There is a host of information covering website visibility, competitive analysis and web development in this toolbar including:

From left to right:

1. Site info which includes all data described below plus other relevant metrics, such as google cached date, indexed pages, Yahoo! .gov and .edu links, plus the number of Del.icio.us bookmarks, Digg submissions and popular stories, StumbleUpon and Twitter.
2. Google PageRank
3. Number of Yahoo! backlinks to the current domain
4. Number of Yahoo! backlinks to the current page
5. Number of listings in DMOZ directory
6. Number of listings in Yahoo! directory
7. Number of listings in BOTW directory
8. Archive.org site age

Next up is the competition section:

Site’s visitor’s demographic and traffic information from Compete.com, Quantcas.com, Alexa.com, Google’s Trends and Search-based Keyword Tool, SEMRush Whois lookup from domaintools Display current website’s IP address IP search using MSN which displays other website’s using the same IP address. HTTP Server Headers tool Ability to change the User Agent

The next set of tools includes:

1. SE Rank Checker
2. A much improved version of SEO XRay (previously available in the “SEO for Firefox” extension), the new version is more pleasant to look at and has visual indicators which highlight heading tags, internal and outgoing links. And displays other useful on-page information such as the web page Title tag, Meta description and Meta keywords with word and character count.
3. The keyword suggestion section has 12 different keyword tools built in, all good free keyword tools are included in it. It is possible to make multiple selection and the toolbar opens each keyword tool in a separate tab. Further there’s also a KW density tool, KW cleaner, KW list and KW typo generator.
4. A button to highlight links with the nofollow attribute on-the-fly.
5. The last button in the toolbar enables you to compare up to 5 different websites/web pages against the same metrics from the “site info” tool.

In my opinion this is a long-awaited toolbar and should be enough to analyse any website. My only complaint is regarding the built-in RSS feed section. It’s possible to manage the feeds completely (like adding/removing, importing/exporting feeds).
I haven’t used his feature of the toolbar very much, but I have noticed that greatly affects Firefox’s speed when in use (and even crashed it a couple of times). This is maybe an issue to be addressed in future versions.