Over the next several days, I will review the Firefox plugins available for the SEO community. The first is the SEO plugin produced by Aaron Wall of SEO Book. The plugin is not available at the Firefox extensions section, but can be accessed at the SEO Book site.

The highlights for this plugin are:

1. Requires no additional real estate on the toolbar. The presence of the plugin is indicated on the right side of the status bar.

2. Works on Google and Yahoo search results pages (not on other pages); displays information related to the query term and sites on the web page itself.Below is a screenshot of how the tool looks like when I search on Google:

1: Information related to the query term.
2: Information related to each site.
3: The SEO symbol on the status bar means the SEO plugin tool has been installed.

Below is the score for each category:

Ease of installation: 5
Ease of use: 4
Amount of time for the information to appear: 3
Usefulness of information presented: 5
Amount of real estate taken up: 3
Documentation: 5
Total: 25

Ease of installation: Go to the site, click on the link to start the install, and restart Firefox. Very easy and straightforward.

Ease of use: I was slightly confused at the very beginning as to how best to leverage the tool. However, everything became clear after a little reading and playing with the tool.

Amount of time for the information to appear: It does take a bit of time for all relevant data to show up for each link.

Usefulness of information presented: Information shown is very useful, covering both the site and the query term.

Amount of real estate taken up: Due to amount of information shown, this tool does take up a fair amount of real estate on the web page.

Documentation: A good documentation is available at the download site.

Wish List

1. I hope the extension only lists the information the users wish to see. For example, as the figure shows, I only want to see 3 data points for each link, yet all data points were listed, occupying valuable real estate unnecessarily.

2. Right now, the way the information is updated for links is that one set of data points is populated first, and then the next set. For example, PR info for all sites are updated before Age info. It would be great if information can be updated by link — i.e., all data points for the first result are shown before any data point for the second result is shown, and so on. I tend to want to see all information for a single site at once, and naturally I’ll be looking at the results for the top-ranked sites first. Currently I have to wait a while before I can see the complete result for any site.

3. Inclusion of additional search engines, such as MSN and Ask.com.