SEO Site Tools – My Favourite Google Chrome Plugin

Unlike many search marketers, I gave up with Mozilla Firefox about 6 months ago. For it to be useful to me, I needed to use lots of plugins, but in using all of these, Firefox became a slow running beast, and a memory hog.

On my old PC, it literally could take 5-10 minutes to load. Now I could have disabled all of the plugins, but in doing so, would this really have helped me?

The answer, is mostly likely no, so I made a “mostly” permanent switch to Google Chrome. I’ve played around with a number of different SEO related Chrome extensions, many of them good, and some less useful, but the one thing that really stands out for me after using them, is that they really don’t impact on the performance of the browser as a whole like the Firefox ones do.

As I said, I use a number of these tools, but the one that stands out is the infinitely useful SEO Site Tools plugin, by Carter Cole – this does all sorts of tasks that I used to have to use a large number of Firefox Plugins for.

First of all, there is the “main” interface that you can access for a webpage that you are viewing in the browser – the information covered here is extensive, and below are some screenshots that look at some of the data that this gives:

As we can see there are a number of different panels containing various useful bits of information about that webpage/site – below are the topics and a brief summary of some of the information that you can get from these areas:

1) External Page Data

This part of SEO Site Tools looks at pulling in information from a number of sources to collate information about the inlinks to that domain – data is taken from the Google & Bing search engines, it pulls in data from Yahoo Site Explorer, Alexa, SeoMoz, Quantcast, DMOZ and Majestic SEO, to give you a snapshot insight into how popular externally that domain is.

2) Page Elements

Chrome, with its tabbed top approach, doesn’t always make it easy to see a webpage’s title tag (it does display the lot if you hover over it, but its not so easy to have a quick view of this).

With SEO Site Tools, you can review the Title tag, Meta Description & Keywords, review whether or not a canonical tag is in place on the page (and what URL it is pointing to if it is there), the number of internal and external links on a page as well as giving you information about any HTML or CSS validation errors.

In a more discreet way, through the use of some tiny icons, you can also see some of the applications and technology powering a website, with icons for WordPress, Google Analytics, jquery and much more.

3) Social Media

In the social media area of the SEO Site Tools plugin, you can see a snapshot of reactions to a website in this sphere – from popular sites such as Facebook, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Twitter, Digg, del.icio.us and Google Buzz – this can give you some idea of how engaged in these channels a particular website is.

4) Page Terms / Tools

This is a very useful section of SEO Site Tools to perform some quick research on a website. When you select the “Extract Terms” button, it pulls in data from the website to give you a list of commonly used terms on that page. Once you have done this, you can interface directly with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Insights to gain data about those terms and their popularity.

If a site is using JavaScript to block the use of right clicking on a page, you have an option here to disable this.

There are also a number of other useful tools here – you can interface with the Google Browser Size Tool, perform a Page Load Speed Test, check the copy on Copyscape and interface with a number of other tools (to be honest, I haven’t used all of these others that frequently).

5) Server / Domain Info

This area of SEO Site Tools allows you to see a large amount of information on where a site is hosted, what technology is in use on a website, as well as information on the use of an XML Sitemap and robots.txt on the website.

Interestingly as this also tells you who hosts this company, it seems to skip any reseller information – for example, I bought my hosting from a company that was clearly a reseller, and (whilst to be fair I had already found this out), it is clear that the site is actually hosted with Fasthosts.

6) Suggestions

Finally, this useful plugin also makes some suggestions on how many links are in use on the page, the length of the title tag, Meta Description & Keyword tags, the use of Alt text on images, the canonical tag, the use of GZip Compression, minimising the use of stop words in title tags, advice on the use of a phone number on the site, as well as comments on the URL length.

The only ones of these suggestions that my own site needed to take action on were phone numbers (not sure I want to give out my personal phone number on my public blog) and having a title tag that was too long… Maybe I’ve tried to stuff a little too much into there

Also usefully, in the bottom left corner when looking at any of these areas, there is a little radio button that allows you to show NoFollow links (without having to locate another plugin to do so – it’s all here in one handy interface.

I’m sure that I am not even using this to its fullest potential just yet – I am frequently finding new things that it interfaces with – it enhances Google Analytics data amongst others not covered here, and at times, I have also seen demographical breakdowns of search user patters on particular keyword terms.

Has anyone found any additional uses for it other that those that I have covered here? It for the most part does the vast majority of what I need an SEO plugin to be doing in my browser – would there be anything anyone would suggest might want to be added in the future?