Firefox SEO plug-ins – two to choose from

Do you know what Alexa rank and Google PR (page rank) your website has? How about your competitors? And what is an Alexa rank anyway?

An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alexa rank the better. Currently google.com has an Alexa rank of 1,and Facebook 4. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.

Google page rank, which ranges from 1 – 10, 10 being the highest measure, indicates how important and relevant Google thinks your site is. yahoo.com is a PR 9. cnn.com has a PR 10.

There are a number of ways to find out Alexa and Google page ranks. For Alexa, you can go directly to alexa.com and look a particular site up. There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.

Check out searchstatus’s icon for options next to the PageRank and Alexa measures. It will, among other things, give you a list of meta tags for a site. SeoBook’s tool bar installs underneath your toolbar bookmarks and presents backlink information at a glance.

Toolbars for SEO, alexa and Google PR

Alexa and Google PR ranks are a quick measure how strong a site is in traffic and from the search engine perspective.  They measure very different things but are both important.

An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site.  This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alex rank the better.  Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic.  And if you are in the top 100,000, congratulations! If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.

A google PR (page rank) is a little harder  to explain as very few people know exactly it is calculated, but it is a measure of how popular and how much of an authority it is.  Google PRs range from 1-10, with 10 being the most coveted.

There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.