SEO Doctor FireFox Extension Review
Vladimir Prevolac recently announced his release of SEO Doctor, a new FireFox Extension.
My initial reaction was “Oh great, another one”, but since Vladimir wrote me directly to take a look at it, I felt I at least had to give it a second glance.
[innerindex title="Jump to section:" div_class="innerindex"]And I am glad I did.
Although there are some quite complex FireFox SEO Extensions in the market already has a few such as SEO for Firefox, SeoQuake SEO and SEOpen, SEO Doctor has other valuable gems that can make your life a lot easier.
Points out problems
After installing the extension and restarting Firefox you are good to go. You will notice a new little bar in your status bar, looking something like this:
The status bar
The red flag gives a quick warning, indicating something needs to be looked at. Clicking the text will open up a two-pane overview with two tabs, “Inspect” and “Stats”.
Inspect Tab
Inspect Tab
The Inspect tab shows you how the linkflow from the url you are visiting. Calculating internal and external links it can both show you that you need to decrease the number of links (148 in my case right now, woops) and we can see that a majority are internal links, which means I should cut down on the internal linking.
Stats Tab
Stats Tab
Now, this tab is interesting. SEO Doctor scans for the most commonly known problems, and informs me that my homepage currently ranks 80/100. How embarrassing.
One of the problems is the number of external links, as we saw before, but the other more immediate problem is the lacking ALT image tags.
I know the importance of this, and I use one of Vladimirs WordPress plugins (SEO Friendly Images) to ensure this does not happen. The problem persists though, and I suspect it is how one of the widget renders its output, investigation pending.
One trick wonder?
Now, if that was all, SEO Doctor would hardly bring a lot to the table, but that is not all.
When you use your mouse and right-clicks on the status bar, you will see some more options:
Right-click menu
Each of these links to external tools, which are quite handy for specific information gathering.
I did found a small thing, clicking on Backlinks, opens up Yahoo in a new browser window with a specific search query: “linkdomain:/ -site:/” in my case. I personally use Yahoo’s Siteexplorer which can also be linked to directly:
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=cleverwp.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s
Siteexplorer reports about 315k backlinks to cleverwp.com, whereas SEO Doctor (via Yahoo) tells me I have about 115k backlinks. Guess which one I wish to believe?
A really nice thing though is the little discreet menu option, “Open all in tabs”.
Open all in tabs
It sounds scary, and for a moment it is. 15 new tabs opens up in your browser, each loading a seperate external page. Other extensions try to gather all information and present it in a tiny space.
Although that has its advantages for quick glances, each link opened by SEO Doctor has more information which you can dive into, giving you better control on where you want to focus your reasearch and dive directly in.
Conclusion
Although not strong enough to be the only tool for SEO work in Firefox, it is another tool to use and the fact that I can instantly see a quick SEO quality score, makes sure all the basics are covered, and you don’t forget something.
Go download it straight away, give it a go, I doubt you will regret installing it.
Allthough at the time of writing this, Vladimir has announced version 1.1 as released, yet it was not possible to download the upgrade for this test, so the review was made on version 1.0
Have you read the interview Vladimir did a while back for CleverWP.com?
P.S.
I couldn’t help myself. I used my own blog for this review, and I felt I should take a closer look at the creators homepage as well.
On his own landingpage for SEO Doctor, he scores 80/100 because Meta Description is missing as well as some ALT Image tags. (albeit some are from gravatar.com).
On his front page though, he scored a solid 100/100. I would have been surprised otherwise. Good work Vladimir.
I am slighlty embarrased about not scoring 100/100 for the seo doctor page and will fix it asap. Gravatars do pose a problem and I will see what I can do to fix it. Probably do not score externally hosted images.
I know exactly how you feel
Did you notice the thing about 1.1 ? I just checked (right now) and only 1.0 of the extension is available for download for me.
Nice post…this plugin as awesome. It has some nice features that the SEOBook toolbar doesnt.
Author: What plugin are you using that displays the Popular Search Terms at the bottom of the post??
Hi Matt H
I use my own plugin, SEO Booster PRO. I am using an alpha of v2, which I am currently developing here on myWordPress.com
You can read more about it here:
Above output is just one of the many things the plugin does.
Hello, congrats for sharing your ideas, great and helpful post.
Here is a FireFox extension i’ve just build:
is called “miniStatus SSS (simple seo shortcut)” and it points the page you’re currently browsing to the Seo and Sem analyzed data in order to get an idea of what that domain is worth or what’s it’s status, etc.
Hope someone will find it useful and help on spreading the word out.