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I have a few cool plugins for Firefox, but one of my favorites is “Search Status.” Here are some things it does:

• It provides not just Google Page Rank, like the Google Toolbar does, but Alexa ranking of any page you land on as well. And these ranks sit in your lower toolbar and you can see it automatically. You can also see a compete rank and an mozRank, which measures the link juice coming into that site, as well.

When you right click on the Search Status symbol (an @, but with a q in the middle), it will show you the following about any site you visit:

• Highlights “no follow” links. Want to see if a blog is allowing spiders to follow links? Turn this option on and all “no follow” links appear in little pink boxes. You may want to use this when considering the site’s link potential.

• Gives you a link report on. How many are coming in/going out? How many of them are follow links?

• Shows the META tags and description

• Shows what the site looked like historically.

• Gives you robots.txt, whois, and sitemap

• Provides the keyword density and highlights any keyword you choose

• Shows all pages indexed in Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now bing.com)

• Shows the sites linking back in Google, Yahoo, and MSN

So, you can learn much of the SEO data just from this little plugin. Of course, some of it overlaps with the data you get from SEO Quake, but I think you really need both plugins to have a fully functional SEO browser. I mean, there are other SEO add-ons for Firefox, but these are 2 I couldn’t do without.

And if you want a firm foundation in SEO, visit http://SpiderLanguage.com

So, I was over at SEOmoz.org today, which is a very cool site. There are tutorials and tools out the ying-yang, which is sweet. But the one thing that took up about twenty minutes of my lunchtime today was the SEO test. How cool is that? You can measure your understanding of SEO.

I did well, though not as well as I’d have liked. I’m always leery of tests, you know. I always assume that what I’m seeing is a trick question, and pick the wrong answer instead of an obvious one. Testers are a sneaky bunch, you know?

But here was the question:

“What of the following is the WORST criterion for estimating the value of a link to your page/site?”

Hmm… there were about 5 choices, but what stuck out at me right away was “Alexa.” I was ready to click that radio button, when I saw Google toolbar page rank.

Toss up?

The Alexa ranking is so nebulous. It means bupkiss, really. Here’s what SEOmoz.org had to say about it:

Since Alexa data is typically less useful (http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-blog-stats) than monkey’s throwing darts at a laptop, that’s the obvious choice for worst metric. The others can all contribute at least some valuable insight into the value a link might pass.

OK, totally true, except… Google toolbar. Brad Fallon told me personally that it means very little because it’s never current. Your page rank changes constantly, but they only update the toolbar about once a quarter.

So, that to me means that PR is also questionable, but it’s obvious where I went wrong. It’s not the WORST indicator of a valuable link. Duh. It’s not a clean estimate, but in the ballpark. Duh again.

Course that’s SEO. Not everyone agrees with everyone else. Want to know what’s right? What works through testing, testing, testing.

Anyway, it was a trick question. LOL

Shouda picked the obvious… Alexa.