This is my most used tool when searching. First go to Aaron Walls site and download SEO for FireFox. Once downloaded install and restart FireFox.

On the bottom right hand corner of your browser there will now be a SEO logo – it is greyed out when off, toggle with the mouse and it will become coloured and on. Do not do all your searches with this on, if you have a fast internet connection Google will treat it like automatic queries after a while and ban your IP address from Google for somewhere between 30 minutes and four hours – therefore if you are using this on a server at work the whole system could be kicked out of Google search for a while.

The default for SEO for FireFox is off, therefore without editing the settings it will not work. Follow the instruction on Aaron’s page and or the tool itself.

Once setup, run a search query; you will now see below each result more information. There are only a few pieces of the huge amount of information that I want to know immediately about a website. The age is right at the start, this is important for getting links from and if I want to get in front of them in the search results, generally the older the site the harder it is to beat and the better it is to get a link from.
The first Yahoo! links number is the inbound links to the whole site and the second Yahoo! Number is the inbound links to that page. The .edu is the education links. Switch off FireFox before opening any of these to see the actual links. You have to open the Yahoo! Page to see the links as the figures given are the total number of links and it often falls dramatically when you open Yahoo! and see that many of the links are coming from the one website – good for Page Rank flow and indexing, but it makes little difference for search results.

The last item on this menu is the whois link. I use this when I cannot find contact details on the website; more often the whois details will have contact information. If there is no whois contact and no contact on the site then it is time to move on quickly.

By no means does this tool give an in-depth guide to the search results, but it can give a very quick feel for the area, and often helps to make my mind up quickly on whether to compete in the area.

Everyone who works in online marketing or is developing their own web site will have various SEO and FireFox add on’s and software tools that they use. For the next while I am going to list some of my favorite and sometimes not so favorite tools.

RedFly Marketing are one of the few Irish companies that have developed a FireFox plugin. I use it simply because it is easier to use than entering the text details myself. (&gl=country code – at the end of the search string).

Their FireFox plugin allows you to easily see the search results in other geographic locations. If you are in Ireland and search using Google, as most people do, then you will be getting results that are influenced by the Irish index. If you can think of Google as huge databases it will help. They have a database for just Irish results so you can click on “pages from Ireland” and this will give you only pages from Ireland.

If you use Google.com in Ireland the results are influenced by your geographic location, therefore the website at the top in Google.com in Ireland is often not the same website that is at the top if the same search is done in the UK or the US for example.

If you are only competing in Ireland and have no care what happens to your website outside of Ireland this may be of no interest to you, however if you sell online this is unlikely to be the case. For example if you search for “B&B Kerry” the same website is at no1 in the US, UK, and Ireland – however the no 2 and beyond change – this information I am sure is very important to the website that is no1, and for the rest who are trying to get that spot.

This plugin is easy to use, just go to the RedFly site and download and install using FireFox. You will be prompted to restart FireFox, do so. Once installed you only have to right click on the screen and go to “Search Google Global” and chose the geographical location to see the different search results.

So the next time your search engine optimisation team tell you just to do a search on Google.com – well they might just have a surprise.