Any business with a website these days needs somebody in the organisation that understands SEO, and now there are numerous tools to help IT managers get on top of their web traffic.
In this article we run you through some of the best Google Chrome extensions helping you to enhance your website and increase search rankings.
1) Majestic SEO’s Backlink Analyzer
Based on Majestic’s own web crawling, their backlink analyzer gives you information about your inbound traffic, including the number of inbound links (backlinks) and domains linking to your site (referring domains).
Majestic also include measures of the strength and trustworthiness of these links, scored out of 100. All the above are broken down into the particular URL, subdomain and domain you happen to be looking at. More granular data is available for Majestic subscribers, but as a free tool this gives you some indication of the popularity of your site and the competition.
2) Mozbar
Moz’s SEO toolbar is slightly deeper than Majestic’s offering, providing a breakdown of page elements and link data. Like Majestic, it provides a ranking of domain popularity (MozRank or mR, scored out of 10) and page popularity (Page Authority or PA).
As with the previous extension, Moz provide more detailed stats to subscribers. Sometimes it is advantageous for web developers to check page rankings from two different sources, which often have different methods of calculating the popularity of websites.
3) Check My Links
A simpler tool than those above, this provides an automated analysis of whether the links on a given page are working. It can take some time to run through a heavily linked page, and at times can be overzealous, but it definitely beats manually checking.
4) SEOquake
The king of free SEO tool bars, SEOquake displays key metrics in a discreet tool bar at the top, offering you more details where you need them in break-out tabs. Google pagerank, Bing index, Facebook likes, Twitter tweets and backlink info are all at your fingertips.
More impressively, the toolbar offers a means of measuring keyword density on any given page, as well as an internal and external links counter. Other features such as the web archive and whois link have less obvious uses, but are interesting nevertheless.
When using Google SEOquake also displays the stats for search results, allowing you to easily compare the stature of sites for a given search enquiry.
5) SEO SERP Workbench
This workbench allows you to check the search engine results pages (SERP) of given keywords and compare yourself to the competition. Most basically this lets you see the page rankings of search terms in list format, but it also lets you plot the fortunes of several sites as you see which is profiting most from keywords.
Users can manage several different projects and websites, and the app supports many countries and search engines.
6) Scraper
For users looking to quickly analyse data, this extension could prove useful to them. By right clicking on any page element one can grab information before exporting it into Google Docs for easy analysis.
Described as "a work-in-progress", the app is particularly useful for extracting tabular information, allowing you to remove unwanted columns without fuss.
