I first mentioned the SEO for Firefox plugin in my post about competitive SEO tools. It already did some cool things, but it’s now been updated to include a nifty feature called SEO X-Ray.
Once you have the plugin installed and updated, a right-click on any page (or left-click, if you’re a lefty like me) in Firefox brings up the option to select it. A transparent grey layer shows on top of the selected page, with a darker grey box showing number of internal and external links to the page, plus meta title, description, and keywords. I know it’s not hard to find this info in other places, but having it all in one place is useful. Clicking the number of links brings up Yahoo Site Explorer, showing the pagerank of each page linked from, type of link (text, img, etc.), anchor text, date, and other info. There is a link to the SEObook keyword density analyzer, which I don’t put a lot of stock in for relevance per se, but I use it to find the general direction a competitor is heading with their SEO efforts. There are options to export the list of links (I couldn’t get this to work), and to run a Whois or IP search.
The dark grey info box is easily moved out of the way using click-and-drag, revealing the transparent layer below. This layer highlights all the Header tag elements on the page (H1, H2, etc.). SEO X-Ray isn’t an entire competitive analysis in one stop, but it’s a very convenient place to start.
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Hi Catharine,
Thanks for doing a review for this tool. I had not updated SEO for Firefox in some time and was not aware of the SEO x-ray feature. So I updated it and gave it a try based on your recommendation.
I was able to get the export feature to work, which I find to be the most useful aspect of the tool. The only problem is that when I export I don’t get the option to open it right then (which is almost invariably going to be what I want to do at that point)
You know, Aaron’s rank checker tool does the same thing.. I wonder why.
Good review – thanks!