The SEO Toolbar

Well that seo toolbar is available and it's produced by the folks at SEO Book. These guys have really outdone themselves with this one. I'm going to explain all the cool things you can do with this tool and then provide you the download link.

As this is a Firefox extension, you need to be using the Mozilla Firefox browser.

Below is a picture of the main toolbar features.

Whenever you navigate to a new web page, the values on the seo toolbar instantly update for that particular site. Let's go into a bit more detail, starting at the left of the toolbar and moving to the right.

Google PageRank: Google's PageRank is a number between 1 and 10. The higher the number, the more "authority" Google gives the site. A higher PageRank typically correlates to more site traffic. Be careful about assigning PageRank some ultimate status. It's simply one indication of a site's popularity. Also, PageRank is only updated every few months so it's pointless to monitor it on a daily or weekly basis.

Links to domain: This is the number of links from other sites that are pointing to your domain. As you probably know, the more high-quality links you have pointing to your site, the more the search engines take notice. If you click on this portion of the toolbar, a new page opens in Yahoo! that actually lists the sites where these links are coming from. Very handy indeed!

Page Links: While the "Links to domain" number gives the number of cumulative links to your domain, this gives the number of links to the specific page you are viewing. While you may have a lot of incoming links pointing to your homepage, it is also important that links point to other pages deeper in your site. These are known as "deep links." You can navigate to any page on your site and immediately see how many links are pointing to that specific page. Clicking on this area of the toolbar opens up a separate Yahoo! page listing the source of the links.

Directory Links: Obtaining high-quality directory links is an important link building strategy. This area of the toolbar shows whether the site has links in what many consider to be the three most important web directories; DMOZ, Yahoo!, and Best of the Web directories. Having one or more links from these directories makes the search engines sit up and take notice. In my opinion, DMOZ is losing ground as a top tier directory since it can take six months or longer to be listed.

Site Age: The search engines typically like stable sites that have been around for a while. This area give the age of the site you are visiting. If the site is only 1-2 years old, there may be no information here. Clicking on this area of the toolbar opens up the WayBack Machine, allowing you to access older archived site pages.

Monthly Uniques: This area gives a rough estimation of monthly traffic for the site you are visiting. Clicking on this area opens up www.compete.com, allowing you to view monthly traffic volume for the site. Use this as a rough indication of a website's traffic volume.

Estimated Traffic Value: Clicking on this section opens up www.semrush.com, giving you information on which keywords from the page you were viewing are ranking in the top 25 at Google. This is a great way to determine what keywords your competitors are ranking, and will help give you ideas on building both your organic and paid keyword programs.

Additional Features of the Toolbar

Next to the PageRank listing in the seo toolbar, you'll see a little blue circle with the letter "i" in it. Clicking on this opens up an overlay providing a summary of great info on the site you are viewing. This includes Alexa ranking, number of pages indexed by Yahoo! and Google, site links, directory links, traffic numbers and more.

It's a great way to get a quick overview on any website. The below screenshot shows this information overlay.

Another really nice feature is the ability to compare all this information with up to five sites simultaneously. With a click of the button, you can bring up an input screen that lets you enter up to five websites to get a side-by-side comparison. The below screenshot shows how the competitive overlay looks.

There's a lot more you can do with this seo toolbar, but there's no need to go into every detail in this review. When you navigate to the download page, you'll get the opportunity to read about the complete set of features as well as view an informational video. This is not a complicated toolbar, but you will need to familiarize yourself with the location of all the functions.

I use this tool on a daily basis and I'm sure you will too. It comes highly recommended and you can download the tool by clicking the link below. Have fun with it!