Using SEO for Firefox for Your Higher Ed Website

Do you ever wonder why some sites show up for search terms and others just never come up?

I love this quote by on Hubspot’s blog.

Anne Carelli, Digital Communications Manager for Coke. She said:

“Several years ago, Coke realized that Coke.com is not their home page – it is Google.com, digg.com and YouTube. Take the time to keep abreast of what is showing up for your brand in these new social sites and search engines.”

So how do you dominate for keyword search terms.  It’s actually very, very difficult to do but if you want to, you should start with understanding where you are in the first place.

There’s a lot you can learn from a simple free download plugin for Firefox called SEO for Firefox.

Firefox for SEO on Notre Dame Science

After you download this plug-in, do a Google Search for your website.  I’m going to use Notre Dame Science as an example.  Marissa and I just did this the other day for her site so I’m hoping she doesn’t mind.

Here’s what the SEO tool showed us.

  • 6 PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
  • 11-1996 Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
  • 385,000 Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
  • 29,500 .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
  • 9 .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
  • 859 .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
  • 61 Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
  • 1 del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
  • 0 Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
  • 18,612 Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
  • 131,000 Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
  • 360 dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
  • 0 Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
  • 4,753 dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
  • WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

What does all this mean?  Well, if you take a snapshot of your website like this and then do the same thing with your competitors.  You can compare the two and then use this as a benchmark as you execute some of your tactics to make your website more powerful.

I also use www.websitegrader.com to see if there are other things that I can improve on a site.  science.nd.edu fared pretty well here.

How is your website?


Comments

26 responses to “Using SEO for Firefox for Your Higher Ed Website”

  1. SEO is great for getting qualified visitors, getting all these statistics can only help get a rounded overview of how your site is performing in the search engines.

    This is only part of the battle. Once you have the visitor what are you going to so with them? User engagement is the next step getting them to perform an action i.e contact you , sign up ect.

    When going for rankings don’t forget the reason behind the wanting of good search engine placement. Tailor your copy for people first and search engines second.

  2. Don Schindler Avatar
    Don Schindler

    I completely agree with Steve. I guess I should have clarified that this is an ongoing series about SEO and overall strategic planning. Call to action on every page of your website is important. There should always be that next step they can take that will get them closer to engagement with you – whether it be an online or offline newsletter, a phone call or email or going to an apply now application program. Thanks for the comment.

  3. I couldn’t agree more with what’s being said here. We can all get sometimes to focussed on the listings when as the saying goes there’s more than one way to skin a cat! Call to action is massively important and the thing that most people forget.

  4. I think the main thing is getting the right visitors to the website, its ok being ranked well for something, but if its getting you the wrong visitors then that not going to get a good conversion.

    Too many people these days miss out on analysis work!

  5. I agree that right visitors should reach the website and it start from keyword research.

    When visitors reaches the website then we should have the good content, and design to reach the goal.

  6. Hi Don,

    Seo for Firefox is one of those tools that really help on our Seo task. It gives us complete details of what we need to know from our site competitor. Other plugin I know is the SeoQuake, try it and you’ll surely like it too.

  7. Hey Don,

    I’ve downloaded the tool and gosh it gives me lots of information about my website. I love it

    Thank you so much,

    Richard

  8. Hi Don,

    Thanks for posting this article. I’ve been using that tools and give me much success in my website optimization. Website Grader tool is used to measure up your website values.

    To the blogger and the webmaster used that its totally free..

  9. Thank you for a very informative post . Its good to see people explaining this sometimes difficult task to people . I use this plug in myself and it helps dramatically.
    Thank you for detailing what it does because you have brought to my attention something I did not know about it , you have given me a aha moment .
    Thank you and keep up the great posts

  10. There are many other SEO plugins/extensions/add ons to all browsers these days. Regardless, you are right we can learn soooooo much from these things these days. Thanks for the post!

  11. There are many other SEO plugins/extensions/add ons to all browsers these days. Regardless, you are right we can learn soooooo much from these things these days. Thanks for the post!

  12. I also like to use the SEO Quake plug-in for Firefox. Its free, I think you just need to register for an account with the creator of the plugin. The plugin lets you see lots of information on the page you are currently looking at like page rank and backlink count as well as alexa rank. Definetly a good one for a pro or novice however if you’re a pro, chances are you’ve already got it. =)

  13. Another great SEO plugin for firefox is SEObook.com’s plugin. It’s great to find out the amount of pages indexed plus has quick links to Quantcast and Compete – which has traffic data and some very basic demographic data. Great post Don!

  14. My top plugins for SEO Work.
    Market Samurai Excellent Keyword tool
    SEO Book – Free
    SEO Quake – Free
    Wordtracker
    I do like your image of ND inside the default theme never think to just go with the basic one.

  15. Deb Dennant Avatar
    Deb Dennant

    Hi,
    Thanks for the post.

    There are many excellent plugins for SEO and there are also useful tips and a whole range of Articles going up at http://tala1107.ws.

    Just thought thought it might help someone as it has helped me with SEO.

    Deb

  16. I have been using Firefox and SEO for Firefox and both of them are a great combination for SEO People.A few months back, I was quite unfamiliar with “how to find or determine do follow attributes” but now I am more than happy to know all this already. On the other hand, I have never heard about Flock, this is a quite new thing for me and i shall be giving it a try.

  17. Interesting discussing about using Firefox plugins / addons for asaccesorial SEO analysis.

    I think a simple SEO addon is Quirk Search Status http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/.

    All the best!
    Sean

  18. Dude, right on there borhter.

  19. Iam using firefox and for the seo purpose I use seoquake plugin which is free.I agree that seo for firefox plugin from seobook is also great.I have used that also.Its really quite interesting topic being discussed here.

  20. Iam using firefox and for the seo purpose I use seoquake plugin which is free.I agree that seo for firefox plugin from seobook is also great.I have used that also.Dude, right on there borhter..

  21. Wow what a great tool. Thanks very much

  22. SEO For Chrome is also a very handy extension. Actually I have recently switched from Firefox to Chrome for practical reasons. Firefox slows down too much when too many extensions are installed.

  23. Have anybody used drop my link tool. that is great for SEO. must try.. to search that simple type drop my link on google. i found so many useful backlinks from this website.

  24. Stay at the top of the search results by devoting a portion of your web space to keyword-rich content as it relates to the latest and greatest in fads, trends, and of-the-moment topics. Chase new points of interest and update them frequently to attract new users who will reward your on-trend outlook with more clicks and unique visitors.

  25. Excellent blog! Do you have any tips for aspiring
    writers? I’m planning to start my own site soon but I’m a little lost on everything.
    Would you propose starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option?
    There are so many options out there that I’m completely confused ..

    Any ideas? Appreciate it!

    1. You should use a paid version of wordpress if you plan on making money with your blog. WordPress.com won’t allow affiliate links. Also, you could lose your wordpress blog at any time if they decided to get rid of it and there’s not much you can do about it.

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