SEO is very important when building a website. It’s always best to know where you stand and how your website is performing to others in this category. To do this, I found an Seo Firefox Plugin that will easily allow you to monitor the SEO or your site as well as others.

This little plugin is great for monitoring the growth of your site. It’s also really good at seeing how your competition is doing. It’s always neat checking out your rivals websites and seeing how they rank compared to yours.

The download link to this plugin can be found by visiting the Seo For Firefox website. Once you download the plugin, just follow the steps on that page. Installation should be quite easy.

Once you have the plugin installed correctly, you should see a little icon at the end of your firefox browser. For the settings, I like to put everything on automatic, so then as soon as I do a Google search it will show the results right away. If you choose to do it manual, it may speed up your search but at the same time you will have to click each little setting individually for each website. This can be very inconvenient. I find that if you do not want to use the plugin just turn it off before you do your search. I only use it when I want to check the rating of a site, whether it be someone else’s or my own.

Here are the settings that I currently use:

As you can see, I set everything to auto. This is far easier then clicking everything by hand. If you want to know what each setting does individually then you can do so reading the manual.

Now, once you are all set up, you are reading to do some searching!

Go visit Google or Yahoo, and type in the address of a website that you like, or even your own. You should now get something like this:

All those little blue boxes on the bottom are the SEO results from your search. It is very convenient, you get all those SEO results whenever you do a search on Google. I love this plugin, I check my rankings almost every day.

If you need a little more detail on what each little term represents, then here is a description of each that is taking out of the manual. I’ll just post it here so you will not have to change the page.

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

There you have it. Chances are you are not familiar with all of these terms, so get to know them and know them well.

This plugin is great for checking your blog for links and whatnot. If you ever want more detail, just click on the number and it will give you more descriptive results. For example: If you were to click on the links tab, it would give you all the websites that are currently linked to the website you are currently viewing.

I highly recommend you install and use this great plugin. I’m sure you will be able to put it to good use, like I have.

If you are still having problems just leave a comment and I’ll be glad to help you out.