Site SEO Tools – Chrome Extension review
25th February 2010 by Emily Mace
Following my recent blogs about Google Chrome extensions for SEO I‘ve been asked to do a review of a new extension for Chrome called SEO Site Tools. Keen to get the most from Chrome following my issues with Firefox last week I’ve installed this plugin and used it whilst working yesterday to see how it worked for me.
The SEO Site Tools extension allows you to see an overview of the SEO on a website from one box. Information from this tool is displayed in a pop up window with a series of tabs covering much of the information you would be looking at when reviewing the SEO of a website, including the following:
External Page Data tab
This tab gives an overview of the site including the PageRank, last cache date, number of indexed pages in Google, Bing and Yahoo. There is also information from SeoMoz’s Linkscape tool and a check on the DMOZ Directory listing for the site. This tab also includes Alexa data which I don’t use. This tab contains a lot of data and has a scroll bar on the side which is a bit annoying, it would be better if all information was displayed without having to scroll but that could just be me being lazy!
Page Elements Tab
This tab shows the title tag of the page, meta description and keyword tabs and confirms if the page passes CSS and HTML verification. I love the verification element of this as with The Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox this was always a clickable option you had to select to see if the code was valid whereas this tool just tells you, so it’s quicker. If you scroll down this tab you can also view the header status of the page and information about link anchors used on the page.
Social media Tab
This tab tells you if the page has been mentioned on a number of social sites including Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Digg.
Page Terms/Tools tab
This tab allows you to pull up a list of the most commonly used keywords on a page and also allows you to go directly to Google’s Search Based Keyword Tool to perform keyword research. There is also a link through to the Google Labs Browser Size tool allowing you to see how much of your website will be visible depending on what monitor size someone is using.
Server/Domain Tab
This tab shows you the domain registration date, IP address of the site and the physical location of a website, all of which are useful tools and it saves having to go to domain tools to retrieve the information.
Suggestions Tab
This tab uses a traffic light system of red, amber and green to highlight areas where attention might be needed. Items shown in green are all OK, amber highlights indicate something you might want to look at and red highlights show things that should be looked at. The items covered n this tab are some of the basics of SEO such as title tag length and Image Alt tags.
The traffic light system works really well as it’s really clear where work is needed on the site and I like this functionality. However, I’d like to see a few other elements added to the Suggestions tab, including a confirmation that there is an H1 tag on a page.
Some of the tools this extension includes are really useful, particularly the Title tag and meta information box, particularly as Chrome’s tabs don’t allow you to read much of the Title tag on a page – which is an annoying downside of using Google Chrome all the time.
Overall I really like this extension; it does most of the functions I’ve used in Firefox and things that I’ve been looking for in Chrome. The Site SEO Tools extension is really easy to use and gives a lot of information in a clear way, which I found when I was working yesterday encouraged me to use the extension rather than making it off putting. There are a couple of things I’d like to see in future releases of Site SEO Tools, such as expanding the tabs so there is no scroll bar on any of them, and it would also be nice to have the option to pin the pop up window down so it doesn’t disappear when you move to another window, which would help you pull out the information displayed without having to keep clicking on the tool to make it appear. I will be continuing to use this extension following my test and I am sure it will enable me to use Chrome to do more of my work, which is all to the good.