SEO’s are always on the look out for tools to make their job easier. This is where Google Chrome’s browser extensions can be such a great help. When you go to the Chrome store for SEO extensions you can easily become overwhelmed with the huge list of possible extensions? So which ones are the best? I’m glad you asked, I went through and tested most of them to see which SEO Extensions were Good, Bad, or useful but Ugly.
The Good SEO Chrome Extensions
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SEO MOZ Bar - Analyze the primary SEO elements of any webpage
- Quickly see important page elements (TItle, Meta Description, H1, H2)
- Page Attributes (Robots, Rel=Canonical, Number of Internal, External links)
- Highlight links on the page, different colors for (Internal, External, Follow, and No Follow)
- If you have a SEO Moz Pro Account you can use their tools easily (SEOmoz Free Trial)
- Clean and simple lay out and design makes this my favorite
SCRAPER- Simple data mining extension
- Quickly find prospective guest posts, twitter followers, wordpress blog comments
- Great “Scraper How To Tutorial” by Justin Briggs
- Huge time saver
Inbox Q – Find people looking for SEO services on Twitter
- Easily find people who are looking for your services on Twitter
- Set up filters to only find good qualifying leads
- Great tips and Inbox Q how to tutorial by David Wells
Buffer App – Scheduling any content to your Twitter and Facebook
- Quickly schedule any content you come across to post at the optimal time on the two biggest social networks
- Social signals are becoming more important in SEO
- Allows you to do social media without taking to much time
Check My Links- On site link checker
- Quickly checks any page for broken links or errors
- Identifies where the link is and what error it is giving
- Great opportunity to inform the webmaster and ask for them to possibly link to you instead
The Bad SEO Chrome Extensions
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SEO Doctor : Bookmark of SEO sites
- Good intentions, but you could make your own bookmark list
- Layout is poorly done
SEO Status Pagerank/Alexa Toolbar
- Google Pagerank and Alexa rankings are becoming less relevant to SEO’s
- Not used often and can be easily found
The Ugly SEO Chrome Extensions
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SEO Quake – SEO Toolbar
- Has some good links and information in the toolbar,
- Same information found in most other tools
- Distracting toolbar, not well formatted
SEO Analysis Tool – Site analysis tool
- Good information and videos to explain each section
- I don’t like having to fill out the captcha each time
- The page is one long scroll down page
SEO & Website Analysis – Site Grader
- Good summary of important SEO information
- Annoying “download pdf” pop up
- Information is same as most other plug ins
Benjamin Beck is an online marketing consultant with an emphasis in SEO and social media. When he is not blogging for Search Engine Journal he likes to post on his own blog, interview marketers, micro lend on Kiva.org , and strive to check things off of his bucket-list.
@ben_beck
BY DAY - Online Marketer & Social Media Junky at @SEERInteractive. BY NIGHT - Kiva Lender & Bucket Lister. http://linkd.in/benjaminbeck
@eru123 Thanks for the heads up! I'll be sure to work on that. Thanks for connecting :) - 3 hours ago
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Thank you for this categorization of Chrome extensions for SEO, its nice to see it this way.
This is a great post…especially for someone like me that doesn’t use Chrome as often. One thing about the SEOQuake toolbar is it’s now no longer working with Google (at least from what I can see) and you will get CAPTCHA at your company if someone is using it extensively (like more than once!). Great tool but just a bit of headache using it.
Great post, I agree with most of it. I’ve been using the Buffer and SEOMOZ already. I will have to check out Scraper. Thanks.
I disagree with your comment regarding SEO Quake. It’s a very good SEO extension and as a free toolbar it has many options which many other SEO toolbars lack.
I use SEO Quake, it’s got some interesting elements… but I think it slows the hell outta chrome… gums that ish up thoroughly only enable it when I need it and never leave it running all the time…
The Check My Links extension for Chrome is fantastic. Much faster than a similar extension on Firefox. A must have for all serious link builders.
Nice post, I would also add a screenshot plugin and an unpersonlized search plugin. But generally, recommend using QuixApp by Yoast. Installing too many plugins will slow down Chrome, just as it slows down Firefox. I wrote a post about it here, if anyone is interested <
Interesting list of the good and the not so good SEO extensions. I’ve been using mainly Firefox for my SEO work and have associated Chrome with the lighter side of my web browsing. All in all thanks for this post.