Looking Under The Hood

Managed to reload a couple of important tools for determining Alexa and Google page rank back into my FireFox installation after a recent "crash". These are must’s in my book for anyone serious about tracking traffic, watching success sites and determining where you fit into the big picture. SearchStatus for example, gives you a real "Under The Hood" look at how other sites are doing. Naturally, you can use these on your own sites as well. Since I was focused on getting them back into my tool kit, thought I would run a post out to show them to you.

They are:

SearchStatus : http://www.quirk.biz/searchstatus/SearchStatus

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialized needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.
For every site you visit using, SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site efficacy

Customize Google : http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/743

CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam). You can also filter results, view search results on other popular search engines and get Google to suggest things as you type in the search bar. To see more about this plugin, check out http://www.customizegoogle.com/

Obviously, these are only a couple of the tools I use that enhance the FireFox experience. If you aren’t browsing with FireFox, you are missing out. Internet Explorer simply can’t compete on the same playing field. FireFox’s community of developers are building "add-on’s" to do just about everything you can think of.

Want to change the way your downloads work? There’s a plugin. Want to add a toolbar that allows you to see all your Facebook activity at once? There’s a plugin.

Today’s Behind The Curtain/Under the Hood tip: Visit http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox and see what productivity tools there are that match what you are doing.