A New Feature-Rich SEO FireFox Addon: SEO Doctor

It looks like Vladimir Prelovac has become our SEJ featured developer. I have already shared his plugin for smart blog interlinking and mentioned another WordPress plugin by him called “Insights” . Today I am sharing his FireFox addon that has been developed for about a year. SEO Doctor is a newly launched FireFox addon that has tons of useful SEO features; I am looking at only a few of them below (to see the more detailed overview, check out Vladimir’s post). Status Bar

3 Ways to Use Multiple Search Engines Simultaneously

How much do you search? As you read this blog, you are likely to search quite a lot. This post is aimed to enhance your search productivity by showing you how to search multiple search engines with one click of a mouse! 1. Web Search

Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search Ranking

Google has just officially announced that website speed is now a new signal when it considers web search ranking. Although not too much weight is given to site speed, still Google encourages website owners to consider implementing site speed booster to make their websites rank higher on Google search. This however applies only to Google.com. And site speed is defined by Google as the speed by which websites responde to web requests.   Google also gave two major reasons why site speed is important – it improves user experience and satisfaction when visiting websites and it reduces operating costs. In determining site speed of a websites it ranks, Google uses various methods and sources. What are those specifically remains secret though. To evaluate the speed of your site, you can use the following tools, as suggested by the Google Webmaster Central Blog : Page Speed , an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement. YSlow , a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist. In  Webmaster Tools , Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about  site performance .   Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Officially Counts Site Speed for Web Search

Better Search with Web Search Pro (FireFox)

Web Search Pro is an awesome tool I wish I had discovered earlier. It’s a FireFox addon that adds quite a few features around your FireFox search box . 1. Group search engines (for Multi-Search) This is my favorite feature! The tool allows to group your installed search engines by topic or the purpose (for example, social media search, reference search, etc) and then search multiple search engines at a time (all result pages will open in separate tabs). 2. Drag & DropZones for search This so-called “a new and innovative way to search the web” works the following way: Select any term on the page; Start dragging it; See “Search boxes”; Drop your term in any you want to search in: The “search boxes” are all based on search engines you have installed for your search box: Drag & DropZones can be customized via the tool settings accessed from the TOOLs menus. From there you can set the look and feel (for example, set the color) and customize the zone order (yes, by dragging them and dropping): 3. Quick Type Search The tool offers a highly customizable set of keyboard shortcuts to switch between the search engines: Assign a keyboard shortcut for any search engines; Group your search engines by topic and assign a keyboard shortcut for the whole group to search all those search engines at a time: Note: I wasn’t able to get all the shortcuts working. Some of them seemed to interfere with my Web developer toolbar, other with the default FireFox behavior, but some of them worked. 4. Realizable search box Have you ever thought that there should be some better way to adjust the look and feel of your FireFox search box? Then you’ll love this option: the ability to resize the search box: To sum up: The tool offers numerous ways to access your installed search engines: search the web using a search box, through the context menu, keyboard only, with the Quick Type Search popup, or using the brand new Drag & DropZones. With the numerous feature set, it is a must that all of them could be optional. The flexible settings allow to disable any of the features and customize those enabled (the settings can also be exported and imported). Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Better Search with Web Search Pro

5 Handy SEO Hacks for Google Analytics

It’s fair to say that most of us are running Google Analytics on at least a few of the sites we deal with. Market share for Google’s traffic tracking platform was estimated last year around 75-80% in a few separate studies – here’s one from Ghostery . Let’s not get into the whole “Google knows too much” thing. The truth is, the platform is a pretty solid and user-friendly. (Even if it is the lure of an evil empire.) But from an SEO standpoint Google ANalytics definitely leaves some things to be desired. Luckily there are plenty of clever SEOs out there who take on complicated and difficult projects that make our lives easier. Here are five such supergeek gifts that hack Google Analytics into a killer SEO tool: 1. Ranking Tracking with Google