Google Pagerank Firefox - carefully explained and what you can do with it - written by top SEO experts
Many webmasters use Google's PageRank and Alexa's rank as indicators of their site's success. These numbers are typically viewed in Internet Explorer toolbars. If you'd like to use Mozilla's FireFox browser as an alternative to IE, there is an extension
Steps
Install FireFox on your PC from
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if you haven't already.
Direct your FireFox browser to
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Select Download Search Status for Firefox. Depending on your Firefox settings, you may need to specifically add this website to your list of approved installation websites. You can do this by pressing the "Edit Options" button that appears on the top of Firefox once you press the "Select Download Search Status" link.
Click on the install button on the Extension Download window, which is located in the "Tools" dropdown menu at the top of the browser.
Close and re-open FireFox to see the new functionality on the bottom right of the browser, in what is called the Status Bar.
Warnings
Remember when you enable PageRank and Alexa functionality, your surfing data is sent back to Google and Amazon (Alexa's owner). Some security conscious internet users prefer not to use these tools for that reason.
I. Introduction
To those of us whose passion for the growth of the World Wide Web is exceeded only by the marketing possibilities that emerge from that growth, the Internet has become a playground for the imagination. There is a large number of marketers, however, who are fascinated by the Web but approach its marketing capabilities more out of necessity than lifestyle. The Internet's capacity has advanced in so many areas in the past few years that marketers playing catch-up are at a significant disadvantage. Marketing directors and account managers with traditional media backgrounds need to expand their breadth of knowledge in order to make informed decisions in today's e-commerce. This article provides clarification surrounding the fairly recent buzzword "Web 2.0" and focuses on the evolution and future of the search engine born occupation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO and its implications are expanding so fast and in so many directions that it has never been more important for C level professionals and traditionally oriented marketers to fully understand the world of Internet search.
II. Search Engines: A Brief History
When the first search engines began cataloging the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s, obtaining a high rank on search engine results pages (SERP) was not particularly difficult or secretive. It was the webmasters who submitted URLs to the engines and communicated a page's relevancy to a keyword search through keyword meta tags in the HTML code. Early engines, like AltaVista, struggled with providing relevant search results because webmasters, who were paid on a cost-per-impression basis at the time, wrote inaccurate meta tags using high search volume keywords in order to increase visits to their websites. It was Google who finally answered the call for a more complex ranking algorithm that would greatly improve the relevancy of SERPs. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, invented the concept of PageRank, an algorithm which helps rank web pages based on the probability that a random person surfing the Internet will find a given page. The PageRank algorithm assigns a numerical value to each web page by analyzing the quantity and quality of the pages that link back to a given page. Known as a backlink, each link represents a vote for the page it links to by the page on which the link appears. The significance of each vote depends on how relevant the page giving the link is to the page receiving the link, as well as the PageRank of the linking page. Along with the changing search engines continually trying to provide more relevant search results to the user, the entire Web has been evolving to meet the needs of the massive Internet population. In conjunction with the growth of the Internet and the popularity of search, a unique profession known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was born. SEO tactics and skills have evolved alongside the changing Internet, but such changes have never been as significant as the most recent. We have entered into a second phase of the Internet, and as a result SEO is taking on a new face. This second generation of the Internet, often referred to as Web 2.0, has moved away from the old model -- based on static websites, clicks, and impressions -- and burst onto a cyber playing field built around communities, participation and open cooperation towards better products and services. An unprecedented level of interaction between consumers, businesses, and interest groups exists in this new Web. Due to the existence of a new social presence, vehicles for driving organic traffic to one's website have expanded far beyond the major search engines. Many of these new tactics also provide additional avenues of incoming traffic, which has significantly expanded the big picture view of the SEO professional. In order to grasp the fundamental principles of the creativity and perspective now required of SEO, it is important to get a better understanding of the new Web 2.0 environment.
III. Web 2.0: The New Internet
Defining or labeling the new Internet is often met with a considerable amount of critique due to the expansive reach of such a description. There are so many different things that have changed about the Internet in the past several years; a concise definition is difficult to come by. In addition, the term Web 2.0, while perhaps the most accurate term, is typically scoffed at by the skeptical industry veteran who is wary of a vendor or brass employee attempting to sound Internet savvy. The World Wide Web has existed for almost twenty years. What is so significant about the changes in the last few years that distinguish the current Web as an upgrade from its previous omnipotent self? The simple answer to this question is you. Web 2.0 represents the user's needs, hopes, and desires finally manifesting into a definable force of "voluntary motivation." The blogosphere, social networks, wikis, and other new forms of expression on the Internet have captured the Web population by harnessing their goals, skills, and interests onto a platform of collaborative creation and production. Websites are reflecting an up-to-the-minute common voice rather than a collection of static informational documents. The Web has never before experienced this level of effective interaction between its users, and that reason alone warrants its 2.0 designation. Ease of self-expression, now apparent on the Internet through the popularity of websites like MySpace and YouTube, is generating massive amounts of original content. Critics of this tremendous increase in creativity and public opinion complain about the dilution of reliable quality content on the Internet. Many social networks, however, naturally weed out undesirable content, and promote popular, well referenced content to the top of searches. In Web 2.0, popular content emerges via a user-generated ranking system that determines the positioning of articles by the number of user votes they receive. This model was made most popular by Digg.com, which joins several community-based popularity websites like Slashdot.com and Reddit.com in providing a user-edited resource for finding news stories, blog entries and other websites. In Web 2.0, up-to-date, reliable content is produced by the editing abilities of the wiki. Wikipedia, the Internet's user-written and -edited encyclopedia, boasts an accuracy level not far from the widely accepted Encyclopedia Britannica. In a study that compared forty-two science entries in both resources, Wikipedia had only four inaccuracies per entry compared to Britannica's three. Social network websites in the new Internet also have a way of allowing like-minded people to find each other's favorite content through a system called social bookmarking. Del.icio.us.com is the most popular example of a social bookmarking website. This system of classification, known as folksonomy, involves users assigning labels, or tags, in the form of keywords, to content on the web. Through this collaborative form of tagging, web content becomes grouped by recognizable categories. Continuous tagging and creation of categories by users increases the content's ability to be searched by a wider range of people. This social phenomenon happens "because stable patterns emerge in tag proportions [allowing] minority opinions [to] coexist alongside extremely popular ones without disrupting the nearly stable consensus choices made by many users." Such websites are considered "social" because of the nature in which users' bookmarks are publicly shared for other users to browse and discover what people find interesting.
IV. SEO Linking Strategy in Web 2.0
The Blogosphere & RSS
The common SEO adage continues to be valid in the 2.0 world: content is king. It is the content boundaries and means for dispatching content that have truly taken SEO to another level. Since the inception of the blogosphere -- a term that describes all blogs as a social network of public opinion -- rumblings of the people's voice via the Internet have quickly risen to a powerful roar. Beginning in the form of an online diary in the mid 90s, the blog has since developed into a simple vehicle of communication for anyone who desires to send content across the Web. The dissemination of information through blogging has become so mainstream that one can find a blog from an authority source on virtually any topic. The blogosphere, centered on the concept of original content, has provided a link rich venue for the SEO to plan his or her linking strategy surrounding good content. So what is "good content," and what does it have to do with good linking strategy in Web 2.0? In this new era of the Internet, good content is viral. Whether this content is a written article, a homemade video or a podcast, if it grabs, provokes or tickles the user, it will travel, and it will travel fast. From the content's eye-view, the Internet has become much easier to navigate following the advent of Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS allows for a program called an aggregator (or feed reader) to notify users of new content added to a website, retrieve that new content, and present it to the user in an easy-to-use interface. RSS and blogging go hand-in-hand because of the constantly updating nature of the blog. As a result of RSS, people are discovering new content on the Internet, passing it along, and linking to it at an unprecedented rate.
Baiting the Link The SEO practice of producing content in hopes that people will link to it from their own website is known as "link baiting." Good link bait has the same qualities as good content. From a well written controversial article to a video clip of a bulldog on a skateboard, website owners will link to any and all content as long as it is interesting and catches people's attention. There are no boundaries surrounding the types of content one can use to bait a link. In fact, the very name of a new kind of link baiting suggests an indefinable quality. This new link baiting tactic is called "widget baiting." Nick Wilson, CEO and senior strategist of the social media market agency Clickinfluence, declared that "the holy grail of linkbaiting in 2007 will be the widget." Creating a popular widget could, in some cases, outweigh traffic from the major search engines. One example of traffic generated by a widget is a blog editor Firefox extension created by the professional blogging company, Performancing, that received close to half a million downloads when it was first released. The brand awareness that widgets can promote has also made advertisers extremely enthusiastic. One would be hard pressed to find a better method of exposure than a logo attached to a button that sits in front of a user's eyes daily. Widgets can be downloaded to the desktop, so the user does not even have to have an internet browser open to be exposed to the advertising. While all interactive marketers will recognize the widget as an effective marketing tactic, in most cases, due to the linking and organic traffic potential, it will be the SEO who is best suited to orchestrate the creation and implementation of the widget. In Web 2.0, effective linking strategy must include widget baiting.
V. Social Media Optimization: A Piece of the SEO Puzzle
In this new age of the Internet, people have been quick to deviate from the title Search Engine Optimization when describing the organic promotion of a website. In August 2006, Rohit Bhargava, VP of Interactive Marketing for Ogilvy Public Relations, coined the phrase Social Media Optimization (SMO) and defined it as the following:
[The act of implementing] changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
On one hand, Bhargava's point is well taken. If the tasks one is performing to drive traffic to a website are not intended to do so by improving search engine rankings, but rather by building a presence in social networks, than perhaps SEO is not the appropriate definition of their occupation. There is no doubt that SEO has undergone, and will continue to undergo, a certain level of compartmentalization. As different areas of SEO continue to experience the growth of specialized services, such as blogging, widget baiting and social networking, the future SEO will spend a large part of his or her time moderating and collaborating with more outsourcing opportunities that are not, by themselves, SEO related. In the end, however, SEO is a sum of its parts, and from the perspective of a company looking to pay for SEO services, all methods of driving organic traffic will reside under the umbrella of Search Engine Optimization. To read the last four sections of this white paper -- Usability vs. Searchability: The RIA Search Challenge, Google's Personalized Search: The End of Traditional SEO?, Search Behavior R&D: Customized Engines and Long Tail Keywords, and the Conclusion -- visit the following URL to download the PDF version of the paper:
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In light of the recent news floating around the web that Internet Explorer's market share has reached an all-time low (Techworld.com - Internet Explorer usage continues to fall), I thought I would share with you my own highs and lows as an SEO searching for the best browser set-up.
Up until the first release of the Google toolbar, I had always been a loyal Safari user. Safari's speed, built-in RSS reader, and it's pop-up blocker were all great selling points for me. But when the Google Toolbar was released, I was less than pleased to learn that they hadn't released a version for Safari users. I found my way around it, as I outlined in Toolbars, Desktop Search and Mac Users, and was pleased with my setup until Google released the Toolbar for Firefox.
I downloaded and tried my hand with the Firefox browser. It was very fast, Open Source and incredibly customizeable with a myriad of add-ons, not just the Google Toolbar. But as an avid Apple user - some even refer to me as an Apple evangelist - it takes a lot more than just a Toolbar and some fancy buttons to pull me from my beloved Apple-made Safari. To me, it just wasn't enough and I switched back to Safari.
Then, a couple of months ago, I read about a new browser, Flock. It had features galore, and a library full of add-ons to customize the application. As an avid blogger, what caught my attention was the built-in blog editor, so I downloaded the application and gave it a whirl. I fell in love and wrote about it: Amazing New Browser - Flock!
Soon enough I did realize there were some problems with Flock, though, such as the fact that it was a RAM hog, and because it is still in beta, it crashed often. But I continued to use it for it's blogging features, Flickr integration, and the built-in newsreader.
Until yesterday. As I sifted through my RSS feeds, reading the latest in tech news, I saw a lot of people talking about the latest Firefox release. I read a lot of great reviews and decided to give Firefox another try. So I updated my older version of Firefox and sifted through the thousands upon thousands of add-ons and extensions for the program and finally found a setup that made my job as a blogger, an SEO and a business owner a lot easier. Here's how I have it set-up:
1. I installed the extension called Performancing for blogging. This blog editor is far more powerful than the built-in blog tool for Flock and the Blogger button on the Google Toolbar. It also allows for the addition of technorati tags, saving posts as drafts or "notes". You can blog with multiple blogs and multiple blogging platforms. It supports technorati searching to find out who links to your blog right in your editor. You can also sign up for a Performancing Metrics account to track your blog statistics and view them within your editor as well. It has a del.ici.ous tab with which you can post bookmarks to your del.ici.ous account. This tool also saves your blogging history so you can go back, read and make reference to previous articles you posted with Performancing. This is absolutely invaluable to an SEO, as any good search marketer knows how fruitful blogging can be, especially with the addition of technorati tags and del.ici.ous bookmarks.
For more info on Performancing, see the Firefox extension page or the Performancing web site.
2. Of all the different news reading add-ons you can get for Firefox, I find Sage to be, by far, the best. It is closest to Flock's integrated newsreader, in that you can organize your feeds into different folders, but it exceeds it in it's sheer speed and layout.
I find that with a lot of newsreader extensions for Firefox, they slow the application down. Sage seems to make no difference whatsoever. Switching between feeds, closing or opening the Sage sidebar, or navigating away from your feeds are all done swiftly without even so much as a second of delay. Sage's layout is easy-to-use, clean and reminds me a bit of Apple's Mail application. It's divided into 3 panels: one is a list of feeds, the next a list of posts in the selected feed and the third is either the actual feed page with descriptions of each item, or any web page you have navigated to while Sage is open. You can import any OPML file so you can keep track of the same feeds you do in any other newsreader without having to enter all the addresses again, and with the feed search tool you can alos find new feeds to add to your list - something that is quite dangerous for me, being as I already devote much of my life to reading RSS feeds. This tool helps me in the search engine optimization industry by keeping me up-to-date with such blogs as the Official Google Blog, MSN, Yahoo! and Matt Cutts' blog about Google and search. It keeps me informaed about where the industry is headed, what new techniques people are using and it gives me one heck of a lot of fodder to post to Gridlock or Groupthink about. And as all good SEOs know, content is king.
For more information on Sage, visit the Sage extension page or the Sage web site.
3. There are a lot of Firefox extensions out there to help search engine marketers, and yes, I downloaded and tried them all. Of course. But I find there are only two SEO tools available for Firefox that are really worth it. The first is, obviously, the Google Toolbar. MSN and Yahoo! have released toolbars as well, but we all know the search engine to conquer is Google being as it has a majority market share that just keeps growing. The value of seeing the Pagerank of every page you navigate to is immeasureable.
The second tool I find useful is the SEOpen Toolbar. This gives you drop-down menus with which you can view the backlinks, the indexed pages, translation of the page, the Pagerank and much much more, for Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Alexa. It also allows you to check all of this at once with the Mass Check tool. On top of this there is another drop down menu that features other tools such as a DMOZ check, a link analyzer, a keyword density anlayzer, HTML Validator, Whois and a lot more. While there are other extensions that let you do a lot of this with even more, such as meta tag analyzers, etc. they tend to take up a lot more valuable browsing real estate, and/or they don't work entirely well.
For more info on the SEOpen Toolbar, please see the SEOpen Toolbar extension page or the SEOpen web site.
4. This is an absolutely great tool. Called LinkChecker, when selected, it checks the links on the page you're viewing to see if they all work. Simple but incredibly handy.
More info on the LinkChecker extension page or the LinkChecker web site.
5. Many of you in the SEO industry know how tedious it can be to submit your clients web sites to directory after directory. Copy/paste, copy/paste and so on and so forth. I have found a few tools in the past that has help made this process a little faster such as the Scribbler widget for the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Snippets for Flock, and a few more that help with the copying of multiple items. However, for Firefox there are two great extensions that go above and beyond just simple copying and pasting multiple items. InFormEnter is much like autofill in that it will fill out entire forms for you, but with a few extras. You can organize different form information into different profiles - so useful for the SEO who works with multiple clients, multiple web sites and multiple submission details. You can also add your own fields. In other words, unlike Autofill, InFormEnter is not limited to name, phone, address and email. You can add your web site descriptions, URLs, keywords, and anything else under the sun you find yourself having to enter repeatedly into web forms.
For more information on InFormEnter visit the InFormEnter extension page or the InFormEnter web site.
A similar tool is called Clippings. It adds a small button to your status bar in Firefox and allows you to organize endless clippings into Folders. This can be great for quoting other web sites, keeping notes, and filling in the same form information over and over much like InFormEnter.
For more information on Clippings, visit the Clippings extension page or the Clippings web site.
6. The last few extensions are just for fun, but still examples of how versataille Firefox really is. Pickup is and extension that allows you to upload and tag photos to your photo sharing account, such as Flickr, and FoxyTunes is an extension that allows you to operate iTunes from within your browser window.
More info on Pickup. More info on FoxyTunes.
There are a lot of other great things about Firefox, such as the ability to change the look of the program with different themes, it's lightning fast compared to IE or Flock, it supports tabbed browsing, organization of bookmarks and of course, it's Open Source. But as an SEO, nothing at all compares to the tools available for it. This setup in Firefox can literally shave my work time in half. And all of it is available for both Windows and Mac users.
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Google Pagerank Firefox
