SEO Toolbar

January 15, 2009 in 3 out of 5 stars, SEO/SEM

What is it?

SEO Toolbar: A tool bar providing very valuable (and juicy) SEO intelligence for any site. If you have a site and are serious about SEO, this is an excellent resource.

Who makes it?

Aaron Wall of SEO Book.com

Why is it the killerest?

First of all, Aaron has had most of these tools available in other forms before now. They are all excellent tools that I've used for a while (SEO Rank Checker and SEO XRay). The SEO Toolbar just packages them into an even easier-to-use interface, with a few more features. In so doing, he has really created something valuable.

It provides valuable SEO information like Page Rank, page links, Compete.com and Alexa scores, site comparison tools, and much more, all at a glance. It also integrated helpful tools like a Keyword Suggest tool that reaches out a dozen keyword tools to help you get the juices flowing and gather intelligence to make decisions.

In addition to the excellent comparison tool built in, it’s handy to load your site, along with your competitors sites up in different tabs, then click across the tabs at the top to see the different scores. 

This is a pretty exciting tool – can’t wait to see it evolve. Watch the video Aaron has put together to learn more.

What could be improved?

BUG: Using the keyword highlight box at the top clears form data on any form page. So don’t write a big blog post online, then use this box or you’ll lose everything. This is evil, and surely a bug, I'm sure it'll be addressed in future versions.

Also, the toolbar should be off by default every time the browser is launched. Otherwise people will install this out of curiosity and leave it running forever on every site they ever visit, forever. In addition to slowing down their browsing experience, it will tax the servers providing this information and potentially jeopardize the ability to freely grab it with tools like this. Make sure you turn it off yourself if you’re just browsing around and not actively doing SEO research.

I’d like to be able to show/hide certain parts of the bar – not sure if this is even possible, but it would be nice. There are a few things I don’t imagine many people will find useful, or that are covered by better tools already. The RSS aggregator, for example.

How much does it cost?

Free (for now, he says that may change at a later date).

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

Tweet   

Get free blog updates and tips by email

I like the seo toolbar, however, it doesnt allow me to customize information that I want on the fly. What would be great is to be able to customize this feature to allow changing the types of information displayed after examining a website. An awesome tool nonetheless, just some minor tweaks and I would die by it. Also, it would be great if they could allow for Opera integration as well.