SEO Quake Firefox Plugin For Beginners

After reading Tony Writes blog post about FireFTP, it got me thinking: what are my most useful Firefox Plugins…and why don’t I share them with the world? From the sound of his blog post, Tony didn’t know about FireFTP until a few weeks ago. That’s on me I think – I’ve been using it for more than a year without telling a soul. Shame on me for not sharing the knowledge – until today. I’m going to try and write a few posts on my favorite Firefox plugins, starting today with SEOQuake.

Setting Up SEO Quake

If you’re an SEO expert, you use this thing 20+ times a day. However, even if you’re NOT an SEO expert, you might still love this plugin. With a quick click, SEO Quake can tell you how popular a website is with the search engines and allow you to make quick comparisons between sites. Keep in mind this plugin isn’t a substitute for real SEO knowledge, but if you’re a web designer or web content writer trying to get a sense for some SEO metrics, it’s a nice plugin to try out.

For beginners, the key is to have the right setup. SEO Quake has a ton of features and many of them are automatically enabled, which means it can get confusing really quickly. So, here’s a suggestion for the “right” beginner’s setup:

1. Once you’ve installed the SEO Quake plugin, go to the “Tools” menu at the top of your browser, select SEO Quake, and then click on the “Plugins” tab (screenshot below):

You’ll see all the various features that SEO Quake includes, but I would only recommend using one of these features if you’re a beginner. Only enable the “seotoolbar” – and then be sure to choose the “by request” option below.

2. Click on the other tabs and disable the seobar plugin, Adspy, and Keywords density. They’re cool, but they might be confusing. You can always turn them on later.

3. Now that you’ve only got one plugin enabled, click on the “Parameters” tab along the top (highlighted in yellow in the image below):

and choose the “basic” presets (highlighted in yellow at the bottom of the image). Click OK. If your settings are correct, you should see a toolbar below your Firefox bookmarks or navigation bar.

Reading SEO Quake

Now, whenever you want to know the SEO metrics of a particular site, click on the “?” icon on the left-hand side of the SEOtoolbar. Here’s what you should see if you try this on the SporkMarketing.com home page:

Here’s what all the items mean, from left to right (starting the Googe PR):

G PR: 4 – This means the site has a Google pagerank of 4. Not bad, but not great. The max possible pagerank is 10, the lowest is 0 or “N/A.” In practice, a PR or 6+ is excellent, 3-5 is good, and 0-3 is OK.

G I:133 – This is the number of pages that Google knows about. It’s not an exact number, but it will give you a good sense of the size of a website. 133 pages is pretty small – CNN.com has more than 176,000 pages indexed by Google. If this number is zero, that’s an indicator of a problem with the site.

Y! I:2,400 – The number of pages indexed by Yahoo, a.k.a. the number of pages that Yahoo knows about. The number of pages that Google, Yahoo, and Bing know about is always different. If this number is zero, that’s an indicator of a problem with the site.

Y! L:3,910 – The number of links to this specific page that Yahoo knows about.

Y! LD: 6,289 – The number of links to this domain that Yahoo knows about. The bigger this number is, the better. In fact, this is the second-most-useful number SEOQuake gives you (besides Google Pagerank).

Y! Dir:No – This means that Sporkmarketing.com isn’t in Yahoo’s directory. We’re not in Yahoo’s directory because that thing costs $300 a year, and that’s a lot of money to pay for a directory listing in my opinion.

(Microsoft-icon) I:514 – The number of pages on this site that Bing knows about. If this number is zero, that’s an indicator of a problem with the site.

(Tree-icon) Dir:No – This means that our site isn’t in the DMOZ directory. Typically, sites with a DMOZ directory listing are older and trusted.

Continued from above…

(lower-case ‘a’ icon) Rank:585384 – This is our Alexa ranking. Alexa is a company that determines how popular websites are. This ranking isn’t very useful for small sites, but it can often tell you how popular one site is compared to another. CNN.com has an Alexa ranking of 60, and Facebook has an Alexa ranking of 2, for instance.

(Delicious icon) I:2 – The number of times that this site is bookmarked in Delicious. Higher numbers are always better (2 is sort of pitiful, in fact – shame on me).

whois – Click on this button and you can find out who the registered owner of a domain is. Very nice for confirming ownership of domains when working with a new client.

source – Click on this button to see the page’s source code (nice for web developers and designers).

Robo: yes – This means our site has a Robots.txt file.

Sitemap: yes – This means our site has a Sitemap.xml file. Both robots.txt and sitemap.xml are recommended best-practices for search engine optimized sites.

(orange and red icon) Traffic: 169 – This is the approximate dollar value of the organic search engine traffic our site receives. If you click on this number, you’ll see a more in-depth report from SEM Rush on how this number is generated. Keep in mind these are rough estimates only – no one should use these numbers to assess the absolute value of a website. However, it’s an interesting metric for comparing sites.

(orange and red icon) Price: 1185 – This is the dollar value of a website as estimated by SEM Rush. Again, no one should use these numbers as an absolute value. They’re mostly for comparison.

There are three more icons after these, but I find them to be mostly useless for non-SEOs.

Five Uses for SEOQuake that aren’t SEO specific:

If you’re not an SEO, you can still use SEO quake to:

1. Evaluate website advertising opportunities. Let’s say that you’re considering buying an ad on a website or purchasing a listing in a link directory – you can use Google’s PR to determine if a site is trusted by Google. If a site doesn’t have a pagerank (or if the rank is only 1 or 2) then it’s either very new or it’s not very trusted…and might not be worth advertising on.

2. Sell a website owner copywriting services. If you’re a website copywriter looking for potential clients, you might be able to convince someone to invest in new content if you can compare their site to their competitors. Something like “you know, competitor1.com and competitor2.com have 1,000 page websites, but you only have 100 pages – do you think that’s why they’re doing more business?” might just help convince someone to buy some professionally written blog posts, etc.

3. See if your competitors are actively working on SEO. If you check your competitors websites periodically and watch for increases in Google pagerank and Yahoo! links-to-domain numbers, you can often see when a competitor is investing in SEO and/or Internet marketing.

4. Tracking the progress of your own site. Check your website’s numbers every month and see how they change. A sudden drop or increase in pagerank, a big increase in Yahoo! links, or significant changes in other metrics usually correspond to changes you make to your site. Basically, it’s a way for you to track what is and isn’t working.

5. Get a sense for what makes a valuable website. If you want to know how to make money online, check out the Traffic and Price numbers for these three websites (it will blow your mind):

• a1-coffee-makers.com
• dailypuppy.com
• golfcoursesguide.org

With no offense intended to the owners of the sites listed above, none of those sites are very fancy, and every one of them could have been created by a regular person (no special programming, no whiz-kids, etc.). Cool, huh?

6. Teach yourself some SEO. Honestly, this is the biggest and best reason to try out SEOQuake. Search engines are going to be a massive part of online marketing for the foreseeable future – it behooves us all to become more acquainted with how search engines work and what metrics are important.

Questions? Anything I forgot?