Thrudigital

Firefox 2 offers people focusing on improving search engine positions and organic traffic a lot of new features which can help to achieve their goals. They are largely based on add-ons and extensions (some of which may be available for earlier versions, but there’s no point writing about earlier versions).

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Web design goes hand-in-hand with SEO. In order to analyse web design, it is recommended that you install the Web Developer 1.1.4 add-on which offers a range of useful features. Many of the features are inspired by the Opera web browser. One of the most important is the possibility of disabling cascading style sheets. When you disable CSS, you see the page just as a search engine does. The content and objects are not formatted and you can see which words are closest to the top. Basically, the closer to the top words are, the more importance they are assigned.

Here you can see how thrudigital’shomepage looks generally:

And here it is after pressing CTRL-SHIFT-S:

Another important aspect of SEO is the presence of images. Since nowadays people prefer design over clearness without considering the disadvantages of such decisions, they are lowering their own positions without even knowing it. It’s unsurprising that you get limited results from the SEO consultant you hired if even you don’t understand the basics. Some sites even use images for everything, including text (placing the content into images) and though such design may be aesthetically pleasing, it’s useless in SEO terms.

For example, look at how thrudigital uses CSS and images. All content uses colours which are defined via CSS instead of background images (apart from a few elements which are image-based).

Naturally, there are more SEO tools available for Firefox, including SeoQuake. It informs information about Google PR, indexed pages in Google, links in Yahoo!, indexed pages in MSN, Alexa rank (though this ranking system doesn’t give precise data), the domain’s age, Del.icio.us index, number of internal and external links, and even allows you to see the keyword density. See the snapshots below to see the keyword density analysis along with “ordinary” search in Google.

As you can see on the lower image, it is very easy to view detailed results about your competitors using this add-on.

Please note that thrudigital is not affiliated with any of the tools mentioned above.