Rank Checker and Ranking History

I use on a daily basis the Firefox addon from SeoBook.com called “Rank Checker”. It is a simple but effective tool that once installed into Firefox gives you quick access to view your position in all the major search engines. You can customize it to give you position results from Google.com and any other local Google search engine along with options to search Yahoo.com or a local Yahoo search and MSN live.

Once installed Rank Checker can be quickly accessed from the bottom of the Firefox browser as a pop up window. From here you can set up profiles to check your position in the SERPS for your domain and the results are stored in the profile for later checking the history.

This tool also has a scheduler so you can set it to run automatically. I find Rank Checker to be great for quick in house ranking information, although it is basic in the way that you do not get any fancy graphs to show your clients, it is very effective as a history ranking information too.

SEO for Firefox

Another tool I use daily and also from Aaron Wall’s SeoBook.com, “SEO for Firefox” is an addon that will display extra SEO information in a Google or Yahoo search. You can also customize this tool to display the information that is relevant to you, from the Google Page Rank of the URL to how many links the URL or domain has in Yahoo, how many .edu links the domain has and many more features. All this being vital to see why your competitors are ranked where they are.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Sit Explorer is great for showing you the back links to your site that they have indexed. You have options to display only links from outside your domain or all links and is a great way to spy on your competition to see where they are getting links.

SeoMoz

SeoMoz is by far the best and most trusted SEO site I know of. Rand Fiskin and his team are both likable and talented people who through their blog offer lots of valuable SEO information. SeoMoz have lots of free tools for use but by joining as a pro member you get access to even more. Their free tools include ;
“Trifecta” – where you can measure how strong your page appears in the search engines.
“Back link checker” where you can view all the links to your site.
“Linkscape” – for free you get access to Linkscapes basic features that gives you lots of information on how your site is fairing in the SERPS. Pro members get even more in-depth  information that can used to compete with your competition.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is easy to set up and free, just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/sign_up.html . After signing up you just add some Javascript to the pages you want to track and that it. After 24 hours you will be able to see all sorts of valuable information about your visitors and how they found you. And all for FREE !! .

Well there are lots more tools out there so feel free to post any comments here about any of the SEO tools you use.

I hand code everything in Dreamweaver and test/view what I am creating in Firefox and IE and find this to be the quickest way to create pages. So if you are building a static X/HTML webpage then there is no need for anything else, set up your CSS and webpage all in Dreamweaver and test in all the browsers you can get your hands on, I find testing in IE6, IE7, Firefox and Google Chrome suitable for most things.

Firefox web development Addons.

Firefox is both a great web browser and an ideal tool for web developers. There are simply loads of free addons to make your life and day to day work tasks easier. The one I use most when building a webpage is FireBug. This tool gives you, with the click of a mouse, detail about any page you are viewing, it can show you all the DOM elements on the page and their related CSS styles, it lets you manipulate the DOM to test or see where problems are and also has a JavaScript debugger built in. One the the best thing I find with FireBug is the ability the view AJAX XMLHttpRequest POSTS and Responses so for testing AJAZ applications it is simply great..

Firefox also has an added called “Web Developer” which when installed can be a great tool for testing XHTML and CSS to see if everything validates. This addon also lets you disable JavaScript and CSS easily and is good for resetting sessions and clearing the cache.
You can download FireBug here – http://getfirebug.com/ .
Download Web Developer here – http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/

Testing Locally

If you are like me and use PHP and MySQL then you will have to set up a local web server to test your work. For the non technical there is a great all-in-one download that will set up a  development environment on your PC in a few easy steps. XAMPP by Apache Friends is a simple download and install to have your own local web server up and running so you can test your MySQL AND php Applications before going live.
Download XAMPP here – http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

SQLyog MySQL GUI client.

When creating databases it really is quicker to have a good GUI client to help you set up all your tables and to test queries before you put them in your page. I use SQLyog from www.webyog.com, its fast, easy to use and great for testing your database queries.