Success With Marc

One of my absolute favorite tools for doing niche research is SEO for Firefox. It’s easy to use, gives tons of useful information, and it’s FREE! The primary function of this useful Firefox add-on is to give you a range of data to get an over-all picture of your niche competition in search engine results.

SEO for Firefox sits in the status bar of the Firefox browser, and one click can turn it on or off. It’s recommended that you keep it off when surfing the net, and only have it on when doing market research. When it’s on the search engines are being pinged, so as a courtesty toggle it on only when you need it.

One of the features I like is I’m looking for a highly ranked site or blog where I can leave a useful comment with my link. SEO for Firefox will tell me if the links on the page or comment section are “no follow” links by highlighting them in red. If I see the red highlight over the links on the page, I may still leave a link for some additonal traffic, but I’ll also know that I’m not getting any link juice.

The main use of SEO for Firefox is for search engine results. For example, after typing in a keyword in Google, the tool will pull all types of useful data to help me determine if I want to pursue a particular niche. Here’s what I’ll learn:

• PR - Google page rank
• Age - date that page was first indexed
• Links - estimate of number of links pointing to domain
• .edu and .gov links - estimate of number of .edu and .gov links pointing to domain
• .edu and .gov page links - estimate of number of .edu and .gov links pointing to page
• Page links - estimate of number of links pointing to a page
• del.icio.us - number of times the URL has been bookmarked at Del.icio.us
• Technorati - number of total links to a site from blogs
• Alexa - rank based on web site traffic
• Cached - shows number of pages from site that are indexed by Google
• dmoz - shows number of pages from site listed in DMOZ
• Bloglines - shows number of subscribers to site in Bloglines
• dir.yahoo.com - shows if site is in Yahoo! directory
• WhoIs - link to look up whois data for the domain

You can customize the tool to give or leave out information, and you can also access tools like Google Trends, Google’s keyword research tool, and more.

It’s very cool and time-saving to sit down and get a good picture of the niche competition and an idea of what kind of work it would take to dominate Page One of the search results.

To start using SEO for Firefox, you first need to be using the Firefox browser (and I’ve recently found that it also works on the Flock browser).

Download the Firefox browser here…

Then, you can download the SEO for Firefox at SEOBook.com.

Happy researching!

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