Welcome back. We'll now be covering browser plugins. There are many plugins available on the market that you can download for free. Whether available in Firefox or Chrome, they give you a deeper understanding of what kind of immediate data you have access to. The difference between using these and more cloud-based or platform-driven tools, is that they may only give you a slice of the data, don't scale as well, and the data of what you export may not be as valuable to you. But if you're objective is to gain a quick understanding of a particular technical slice of your business or website, they can be invaluable. I'll also touch in this lesson on some of the common plug-ins available for the WordPress platform. As that's a very common environment in which to do web development. Let's look at plug-ins. A plug-in sits directly in your browser, typically Chrome or Firefox. Plug-in has similar functionality to the prior tools covered, but may not be as enterprise friendly. You can't export the data in the same way either. However, plug-ins provide a more efficient crawl by the bots. And enable them to see things quickly and you gain an understanding about your site. That could mean improving domain value to search engines, increasing the total number of pages crawled and index or somehow increasing your long-tail traffic. Consider these browser plug-ins within the Chrome browser, WooRank iSEO, SEO Site Tools, Ayima and also, Check My Links. These five plug-ins, and many more, are very useful for technical SEO. They might provide ranking data, technical views, hops issues. In the case of Ayima maybe related to 301 or 302 redirects or status codes, or perhaps around checking the links that are available directly in a web page. Finally, Firefox has a classic tool called Web Developer that gives a lot of data and information that anyone from a web development perspective would find of interest. On making sense of some of these plugins and trying them yourself, you'll have a better understanding of their usefulness. Ayima, for example, does HTTP headers and redirect checking, so if you have redirect issues, this would alert you to them directly flagging redirects and errors and also displaying HTTP headers such as server types or caching headers as well as the server IP address. So if you're having issues with redirects, I recommend looking at Ayima and maybe doing an audit of your site. The Web Developer plugin in Firefox is very good, definitely worth trying. You can see how the site is laid out, the different forms available, information about images and the CSS types, and you can do it very quickly in a streamlined way. You can add on Google Global in Firefox. It's not a full proof tool but it can't tell you in Google search results what the results might show from any country, city or ZIP code if you were in that location. It's not obtrusive, available anytime you pull up a search results page and it doesn't clutter up your menu bar. Using Google Global can give you a quick indication of visibility from different points of view in different locations. SEO Site Tools is in Chrome. This delivers external and on-page metrics, social media info, and search engine results info from Yahoo, Bing and Google. It can align with Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for metrics. It's very comprehensive and does more than just pulling metrics. It gives you a cross-section across social medial and the Google Search Console dashboard, as well. SEOQuake is another classic plug-in. It gives you visibility of SEO parameters directly in the search results. Sometimes it can be obtrusive but you're able to hide it fairly quickly and it's worth using the SEOQuick plugin if you're interested in the search results and how those stack up for common queries you run. Finally, I've included a list of common SEO plug-ins for WordPress. WordPress is such a common content management platform and quite often the plug-ins used in there enable and improve SEO performance. So I'll quickly list this. WordPress SEO, this is real popular. It includes XML site maps for the search console and footer and breadcrumb information. All in one SEO, a very simple UI similar to WordPress SEO plug-in. Squirrly SEO helps with real time optimization of articles. The Premium SEO Pack does search results, page tracking, Sitemaps, Google Analytics and 404 error management. SEO Auto Links allows interlinking between related posts. Redirection plugin in WordPress handles your redirect page URLs and error status codes and monitors redirects. Broken Link Checker checks posts, comments for broken links and missing images. And finally, the BWP XML Sitemaps plug-in creates sitemaps individually for posts, pages with the appropriate taxonomy.
