The popularity of the SEO Toolbar is on the rise with recent offerings from SEOmoz and today a new SEO Toolbar from Aaron Wall at SEO Book.
The SEOBook Toolbar seems to work best on FireFox 3 and includes as much data as you could ever need to evaluate a page quickly. Best of all it has an in-built RSS reader with the Blogstorm feed included meaning I get lots more RSS subscribers which is why I decided to help Aaron promote it. 
Last year I switched to Google Chrome and don’t use Firefox much at all. Chrome is faster and allows me to get more done in a day. The disadvantage is the lack of toolbars although Dave Naylor has an overlay bookmarklet that does enough for me.
Do you use SEO toolbars? Which is your favourite?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I use Chrome 100% of the time. Its Flash support is still a bit suspect, but apart from that I agree – it lets me get more done.
I use Firefox now only for the toolbar support. Or if I need 2 different logins open to the same site at the same time (1 in Firefox, 1 in Chrome).
Once Chrome gets add-in support then I’ll use Firefox only for testing I expect.
Never used SEO toolbar though I would like to try it once.
to be honest i find they clutter up my screen space on the laptop
At the office i use web developer
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
and Seo quake
http://www.seoquake.com/
SEO Toolbars:
SEOmoz ’s toolbar is only useful to paid members.
SEOBook – yet to use it.
Google chrome seems to be good only if you are opening just 2 -3 tabs. In my experiences, whenever i opne more than 4 tabs, it crashes. I have the same issue over and over again ( in vista & windows XP ) . Issues is greater when using google spreadsheets.
Complete waste of time and space. Half the stuff doesn’t even work right, ranking check is throwing up totally wrong results and the yahoo information just isn’t right for me.
Am I doing something wrong or is the tool just buggy?
Initial thoughts are that it will be a useful tool to use as it has functionality I normally switch to other applications or website for, like keyword ranking checker and the yahoo links check, being able to do it on site via the toolbar will speed things up abit.
As a web developer I like to use:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
mainly for it’s css and html validation tools
But I think the best all round web dev, design and SEO add on is FireBug:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
not just for web dev, for SEO as well as you can quickly and easily view source code for a website and assess it’s on site SEO efforts on various page elements.
As an aside, I found after the latest update, Cooliris Piclens makes Firefox crash, a lot.
@Charles – just open up a new incognito Window in Chrome (Ctrl+Shift+n) if you need two different logins. Allows you to work with 2 different Gmail accounts, for example. I hope future versions will allow incognito in a new tab, instead of window.
Will you be linking SEO to yourself in every post? That’s already getting boring!
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It’s an SEO experiment using a plugin. Surely you are interested to see the results?
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Am a webmaster. Must have tons of Programming and seo, add-ons, etc. I have BetterSearch, Firebug, GreaseMonkey, Webmaster, McAffee Advisor, Context Menus, SiteXRay, Speed Check, CompareSites Dialog, WhoIs (DomainTools addons), Keyword Apps built into SEOBook toolbar, …. etc. Alexa, Google Ranks (many at bottom of browser in incon only) download any video alive button, and much more.
Firefox is the only Browser I can use. I used to be hard-core IE. Chrome too limited, though very fast. Safari extremely fast also limited i.e., not supported in api much.
When I’m just surfing in a hurry, I’ll pull up Chrome or Safari, but the minute I start to bookmark, work, social or otherwise decide to survey a site, I have to copy the URL over to FireFox. And my FF window has plenty of room, you CAN arrange your toolbars if you know how. Now that I’ve found all these tools I use every day, 24/7, on toolbar or add-ons for FF, I have completely switched. It saves me tons of analyze time remembering my seo steps or having to look up all these tools in individual bookmarks …. Results are instant on browser, I don’t have to think about where to measure them, I can just get going on the objective of the analytics and information I need.
guess I’m now a huge FireFox fan, but I do keep all browsers installed since I have to see my website designs in each one, (that’s still no fun).
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