Below I have listed my favourite Chrome Plugins for various on page and off page SEO tasks from checking rankings, checking keyword density, links, speed and broken links. I have listed one plugin for each of the tasks that it is useful to have a quick review of it via the Chrome toolbar.
Best for Checking Rankings
Fat Rank
I love Fat Rank as it makes checking keyword rankings really easy from your browser. Land on the website you want to check a ranking for, open the toolbar, putting in the keyword and the toolbar will find the organic ranking for the site and also give you the URL of the ranking page. If you typed in Plumber Bath it will return the page on your site that is ranking for that term. It goes down to page 10 of the results so you get a good understanding of organic reach of your website.
I use it every day when I check client and competitor rankings.
Best for On Page Analysis
SEO Quake
SEO Quake is great for online analysis and I find the density tab really useful for LSI research, the Page Info is good for basics like meta titles and descriptions, the Diagnosis tab looks at images, H1s, Schema text and open graph data. Great for a quick snapshot of either a client or competitor page.
Best for Speed Tests
YSLow
Page speed is an important SEO factor and is also vital for site usability. While YSlow won’t tell you the actual load time of a specific web page, it will provide more than 20 different performance grades, as well as advice on how to improve both speed and performance.
Best for Competitor Marketing Analysis
Ghostery
The Ghostery chrome extension is less of a pure SEO tool and aid for auditing the online marketing mix engine of a domain. Load the website in the browser and Ghostery examines the cookies. The plugin then produces a list of cookies and you can click on them to discover more about each cookie type. The cookies tracked include analysis, widgets, beacons, privacy setting and advertising.
I find it really useful for competitor analysis and for scoping their SEM footprint. Ghostery allows you to uncover which ad networks and retargeting networks a website is using and give you an insight to their SEM mix if they are using Facebook marketing and how they are tracking users to their site.
Best for Broken Link Checking
HREF Check My Links
HREF check my links is a brilliant tool for broken link building and general internal link analysis. Load a webpage in chrome, click on the icon and the page is scanned for all links. Once the scan is complete, you then get the details of total number of links, the percentage of live links and the numbers of live and broken links. The two types of links are highlighted, green for good links and red for broken links. The extension is a dream to use and I use it for broken link building and checking internal resource pages.
It works great on Wikipedia pages or industry resource pages if you are looking to place links to information content.
Best for Link Analysis
Majestic SEO
The Majestic SEO plugin comes into its own when you have a paid account as it unlocks all the features and allows you access to the full database.I prefer the Majestic back link database to the one on Moz at the moment as it tends to cover a wider range of links and it is so much faster to get the downloads.
Clicking on the icon opens tabs for the following areas:
- SEO Summary – link profile, external links, trust flow, citation flow for the page open
- Backlinks – list of the highest value SEO links
- Anchor Text – basic analysis of the anchor text of incoming links to the page
- Tools – links to third party resources on Majestic including neighbourhood checker
The extension is useful for getting a quick overview of the off-page SEO metrics of any given page competitor or client sites. My primary use of the plugin is for website audits, competitor analysis and for grading pages when looking to place back links.
Tony Heywood (C)
