Some of them are fairly common, others a little geeky and for specific uses.

These are however the plugins I use or have remained installed on Firefox for an extended period of time, and many might prove useful.

Pick up the collection here:- Blogger SEO & Internet Marketing Tools

Individual plugins

1. SEO Link Analysis - Adds essential data to Google Webmaster Tools & Yahoo! Site Explorer
2. StomperTools - A totally unique plugin – this is why the Stompernet guys rock
3. TableTools - Ever wanted to reverse the sorting of an HTML table – this can do it, though you might need to create an extra column with a reverse index.
4. User Agent Switcher - Prowl around the web as Googlebot and interesting things can happen
5. Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer(S3Fox) - The easiest way to add files to Amazon S3 for casual users.
6. Talon: Screen Capture & Aviary.com Quick Launch – Look on this one as a bonus as it was just added, might prove to be a total Snagit replacement for those times I just need to grab part of a page.
7. Extended Copy Menu - Makes it easier to copy/paste HTML rather than text
8. Save Complete - Save complete webpages correctly for later reference – especially good for things like complete sales pages
9. Better Google Analytics (BetterGA) - Enhances Google Analytics with a compilation of user scripts.
10. XPath Checker - One of 2 applications that allow me to try to learn Xpath – useful when playing with scraping ;)
11. XPather - One of 2 applications that allow me to try to learn Xpath – useful when playing with scraping ;)
12. CacheViewer - This is an extra – for those times when you just know you saw a great picture, and can’t remember, or for finding videos ;)
13. Screengrab - My favorite of all screen grabbing software – uses the Mozilla engine to render a full page extremely fast, then you can go back at a later date to edit. Also own commercial Snagit, but this gets used more often.
14. Roboform Toolbar for Firefox - Don’t remember passwords, they just clog up your head
15. IE Tab – Essential for people who don’t want to load IE… ever
16. Evernote Web Clipper - Saving complete pages for future reference – I am starting to use this more and more, planning for future blog posts and major projects
17. PDF Download - I download PDFs a lot, and it is annoying when you click a link and discover it is a PDF, and it tries to load in the browser – the view as HTML option doesn’t always work very well
18. KGen - Steal other people’s primary keywords
19. iMacros for Firefox - For when you want to automate things like submissions of articles, videos, social bookmarking etc
20. Google Global - I use this to check US/UK search results with personalized search off – especially useful when posting search results in a blog post and you want the reader to see roughly the same results as you do.
21. YSlow - How fast is your website, and how to fix it
22. Greasemonkey - Need to add lots of cool plugins, found on Userscripts site – I will add an update to this post including essential Greasemonkey scripts at a later date
23. Web Developer - My default tool for working out what is happening or going wrong with CSS
24. Firebug - The primary reason to add this is to use Yslow and Google’s Page Speed plugins, though currently I can’t find Page Speed listed – otherwise I really don’t need both this and Web Developer
25. Live HTTP Headers - For checking redirects, snagging cloaked affiliate IDs etc. Also great to find the location of videos supposedly being cloaked from Amazon S3 for download.
26. FoxyProxy – For people who want to be a little anonymous, or when for some reason you can’t access a site as you
27. SearchStatus - Can load in the status bar rather than as a full toolbar, thus I have this on all the time without consuming screen real estate
28. Power Twitter - Can slow loading a bit, but makes the Twitter experience totally different
29. ScribeFire Blog Editor - I tend to use the WordPress interface more, due to lots of custom fields for SEO that need to be filled out – would be great if this somehow could work with Headspace.
30. Shareaholic for Firefox - If you really must use lots of social bookmarking sites
31. Delicious Bookmarks - For public bookmark sharing
32. StumbleUpon - Don’t forget to follow my stumbles on Stumpleupon http://andybeard.stumbleupon.com

Not In Collection (Not on Mozilla)

SEO For Firefox – for data when you need it

SEO Toolbar – for data while you surf

Free Download Manager – I have tried lots of others, but this is my download manager of choice, mainly because it remains free, is now open source, and has never had a corrupted database (a major factor)

Google Page Speed – New addition from Google to check out the speed of your web pages – strangely the thing which slows my blog down the most is their own Google Friend Connect bar at the bottom of the page.

For years I have been reading absurd suggestions that Google’s Blogger / Blogspot service is SEO friendly. At one time this was semi-true, and it is even possible with the current incarnation. However if you use the service “as intended”, without expert knowledge, you might find yourself up a creek without a paddle.

I am writing this on a Sunday, thus I am going to avoid vulgarities, cussing, and even an attention grabbing headline. The Google engineers at Blogger deserve that and more. Blogspot currently stinks for SEO.

Google Webmaster Guidelines Mess Up

This is probably the root cause of the Blogger problems

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don’t add much value for users coming from search engines.

Blogspot Doesn’t Have Categories

There was a historical lacking feature in Blogspot, no categories, and users wanted them.

So Blogger introduced labels, but they unfortunately followed the advice from their own Webmaster Guidelines, such as this example from Blogger’s own Blogger Buzz blog.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow: 

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: http://buzz.blogger.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

That causes label pages such as this one on the Google Webmaster blog not to be crawled

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search/label/webmaster%20tools

The links to those tag pages don’t have nofollow, but Google can’t crawl them to read what is on the page, but pages blocked using robots.txt still accumulate PageRank.

Blogger blocks labels with Robots.txt

That creates “hanging or dangling pages” and the PageRank gets shared out between all the pages in the internet

There are easy solutions to this:-

Best solution

• Have excerpts on the label pages
• Possibly noindex the label pages with either meta noindex or robots.txt noindex
• Add nofollow to all external links on the label pages, both in the content and sidebar

Stop-gap solution

• Nofollow label links from content – they still wouldn’t give any deep indexing benefit, but at least they wouldn’t throw PageRank away.

Note: Those solutions are for blogger developers to implement instead of using robots.txt disallow, not for Blogger users. Sorry Blogger users, you have been at a significant disadvantage for years unless you can find a smart (viable) alternative to creating categories by hand.

Blogspot Indexing Problems

With labels being blocked by robots.txt, some but not all Blogspot blogs have major indexing problems.

As an example, it doesn’t seem like Google passes any juice through the dropdown menus used on the Webmaster Central blog.

Dropdown Menus On Blogspot Could Cause Indexing Problems

Of couse not every Blogspot publisher displays date based archives, and even the traditional “older posts / newer posts” navigation ends up being blocked by the robots.txt file.

As an example this link from Rick Klau’s blog (A Blogger Product Manager)

http://tins.rklau.com/search?updated-max=2009-05-04T11%3A53%3A00-07%3A00&max-results=7

You can see by the lack of snippet and cache that this is blocked by robots.txt

Blogger Older Posts Navigation Blocked With Robots.txt

Fortunately for Rick he doesn’t allow his labels and pagination links to be the only method for Google to crawl his content, plus he has a huge amount of “Google Juice” to play with.

This is actually the best navigation implementation I have seen on any Blogspot blog, as it has allowed all his content to be indexed, or certainly the vast majority.

Blogger Navigation That Works

This is still “ball linking” rather than a structured appraoch, but for Blogspot it is about all you could hope to achieve.

By having this massive navigation on every page, effectively turning every page into a sitemap, there are so many link on page that a few external or internal label links don’t really matter.

This isn’t the case with the majority of Blogger blogs, and blocking with robots.txt is an abomination.

At the same time Rick has been trying to persuade people to stop using the old, unreliable Blogspot system which allowed you to publish to your own domain, suggesting that there are no problems.

How Hard Is It To Leave Blogger?

Whilst people talk about it being easy to leave Blogger to another platform, the importer has been bugged for a long time – Blogger strips stopwords from generated URLs, WordPress doesn’t.

Then there is only what I would term a “Interstitial Defamation Wall”

Redirects from Blogspot to a custom domain now hosted externally get slapped with an interstitial warning.

See for yourself http://niche-website.blogspot.com

I had already left Blogspot before Google decided to finally provide custom domain support. I had set up a complicated script with meta redirects, and I even regained my rankings and wrote about it.

When custom domains became available, I decided that it would be best to assign andybeard.eu to my blogspot account, and then point it at WordPress so that visitors and search spiders saw an immediate 301 redirect.

Google when you set this up are very reassuring

Blogger Custom Domain Setup

It seems this is only true if you stay with Blogger forever. I should also point out that during my testing I discovered that I could no longer assign andybeard.eu, and I was forced to use www.andybeard.eu

Links & Rankings

The main thing that ties any Blogger to using Blogspot are incoming links and rankings. When I moved I probably had 24,000 links to my old Blogspot, depending on which reporting you believed.

Even a couple of weeks ago Yahoo was reporting ~10K , though it seemed a lot less today. Google in Webmaster tools only reports 100 or so, though they may have removed loads due to the redirects.

I don’t care that much, building up links takes time but isn’t something that can’t be fairly easily replaced over time, at least for me.

However for any potential blogging service provider (and honestly anyone running WordPress might soon be able to offer blog hosting within 3-6 months if WordPress core merges with WPMU) this is a serious barrier to overcome.

If you use Blogspot, but with a custom domain from the beginning, this isn’t a problem, but for everyone else, it might be a deciding factor to stay.

I could switch back to the delayed meta refresh method, but I can’t see why I should have to – Google should never have inserted such a message between me and my visitors.

I am looking to clean up some old articles because there is too much SEO junk on the web, but deciding how to handle my old “How to move from Blogspot to WordPress” articles are a major problem.

• I am adamant that people really should still leave Blogger for their own good, if they value their online business
• I am not in a position to advise on best practice, and the most suitable method is messed up.

As far as I am concerned this interstitial isn’t passing any juice through to Andybeard.eu, though there is a YES/No link, but it uses onclick, but returns false, but the URL is not constructed… ask Sebastian if you want a definitive answer.

What Does Zemanta Do Exactly?

It adds editing functions to various popular online blogging interfaces, WordPress (both .org and .com), Blogger and Typepad. These are the type of functions you could probably add a plugin for if you are using WordPress on your own hosting, but wouldn’t be available for Blogger, Typepad and WordPress.com users.

That makes it something worth taking a careful look at for niche marketers, even if you use WordPress for most of your blogs, as it might save you lots of additional installation, possible incompatibility problems in the future with WordPress upgrades, upgrades to plugins etc.

Links

Links are provided based upon various keywords that you use – unfortunately the links are almost all to Wikipedia articles, or a few popular websites.
I am wondering if it learns as it goes along, so I should probably include links to myself for niche marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, internet business, social media marketing, WordPress SEO etc.

Tagging

Zemanta provides tag suggestions based on keywords used in an article. It also seems to pick up related keywords, so for Zemanta whilst I am typing this it also picked up “Seedcamp” as a tag, which is where the developers attended to get seed funding.

I should note that whilst writing this article it didn’t pick up blogger as a tag, just as a link so far – actually that has just changed. Zemanta updates all the options available every 300 characters automatically, though you can force a manual refresh.

Yes the same functionality is available from multiple WordPress plugins, but this doesn’t require plugins and works on multiple platforms.

Gallery Pictures

Every 300 characters you write a small gallery of pictures updates in the right hand menu, based again on some kind or keyword or fully contextual algorithm.

Whilst writing the article on the book survey the following pictures were chosen. (note: I have just added them to the page with the code they use, which includes a mass of block spans and floats – nasty stuff)

Example pictures

Source: Shutterstock
Source: Shutterstock
Source: Fotolia
Source: Fotolia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia

Maybe I should have forced them into a table

The pictures seem to originate from various free stock photo sources plus Wikipedia commons. I must admit the pictures come wrapped in some fairly ugly code that is probably going to look wonderful to thousands of RSS readers.

<span class="zemanta-img" style="margin: 1em; display: block; float: right;"><a href="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/Image:101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/202px-101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" style="border: medium none ; display: block;"></a><span style="margin: 1em 0pt 0pt; display: block;">Source: <a href="http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/Image:101_016_DRI_Ingolstadt.jpg" target="_blank">Wikipedia</a></span></span>

Other than the horrible code, there are other problems

• The pictures aren’t very useful – some require additional payment for larger versions, and they are all small thumbnails even if larger pictures might be available for free
• Clicking an image in the right hand side menu inserts the image at the top of the document you are editing, and even replaces an existing one. I had to copy and paste each one before selecting the next to include all 9 images above
• No dimensions provided in the code for the images
• The images are linked, along with attribution – that is overkill especially without using nofollow – there isn’t a link to a license

This part needs a little bit of work to make it useful, with both thumbnails and full images of a defined size, previews and much cleaner code.

Articles

This is a time saver for new topics, maybe less interesting for longer term because there isn’t enough of a selection to choose an appropriate article for topics that have a long history in the blogosphere.

I am just going to link through to what I can currently see for Zemanta

Each article you click is added using a fieldset.

It will be interesting to see how this appears in an RSS feed as well – you notice how much effort they are placing on branding Zemanta with all the attribution?

This type of linking may be of some use for readers, but doesn’t really encourage a blogger to visit the articles, and add something to the conversation – it is just links to related content, not what it should be, real commentary.

Your average blogger is going to have a real headache looking at this code to decide how to edit it, and the titles added to the links are really not very useful.

<fieldset class="zemanta-related" style="margin: 0.5em 0pt 1em; padding: 0pt;"><legend class="zemanta-title">Related articles</legend><ul class="zemanta-article-ul" style="margin: 1em 0pt 1.5em; padding: 0pt;"><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://fourstarters.com/2008/03/28/zemanta-content-suggestion-for-bloggers/">Zemanta - Content Suggestion for Bloggers</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/27/a-content-suggestion-engine-for-blogging-that-could-work/">A content suggestion engine for blogging? That could work...</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.blogherald.com/2008/03/27/zemanta-for-bloggers-good-idea-bad-idea-or-great-idea/">Zemanta For Bloggers? Good Idea, Bad Idea, Or Great Idea?</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.simonwaldman.net/2008/03/26/trying-out-zemanta/">Trying out Zemanta</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/zementa_brings_a_semantic_layer_to_blogs.php">Zementa Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li><li class="zemanta-article" style="margin: 0.5em 2em;"><a title="Open in new window" href="http://funkykaraoke.blogspot.com/2008/03/zemanta-content-suggestion-engine-for.html">Zemanta - A content suggestion engine for blogging</a> [via&nbsp;Zemanta]</li></ul></fieldset>

But for this article it was a real time saver other than one problem… duplication – at one time whilst I was writing there was a link included to an article on Read Write Web, but for some reason when I came to click the list of 6 links, that had disappeared. I tried refreshing a few times with no luck.
It has actually now refreshed correctly, but every time I now try to introduce the links somewhere in this existing article, I seem to end up losing half of what I have written. There is some strange rewriting going on – this plugin is complex, and currently a little idiosyncratic.

Update – eventually I managed to get it to show all 6 articles

Whatever you use from Zemanta, it automatically includes this badge at the bottom of the article – lots more viral branding and links – I think there is a little overkill.

It is Alpha

I am trying to not be overly harsh and just give useful feedback – this plugin is just alpha and shows a lot of promise, for people who like to use an online interface for their blogging.
I wonder if an additional plugin is planned for use in some way with Windows Live Writer or other desktop software which have plugin interfaces. I can see there being additional demand.

Overall I am impressed and feel this will be a very useful service for the future. I am not sure how they are going to make money from it, though they do have funding.

From the Bidvertiser Blog

To address this, we have now launched 3 unique solutions:

1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.

2. Solution for FeedBurner that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in your current FeedBurner address. Click here to learn more about the FeedBurner solution.

3. Solution for Blogger/Blogspot that allows you to embed the BidVertiser Ads in the footer of each of your post feeds. Click here to learn more about the Blogger solution.

This now makes Bidvertiser feed advertising a much more viable solution

When I link to a Wordperss blog, most of the time I can just use pingback which autodiscovers the trackback URL for any blog I link to within a post and sends a trackback to the blog owner.

On some WordPress blogs they have removed the pingback code to reduce spam. Fair enough I enter a trackback URL if I want to give them a signal that I have written something that might be worth their while reading.

On Blogger there are now linkbacks powered by Google blogsearch, so you can tell who has linked to you. A Blogger user can also send a trackback using a convenient script.

If I am sending a trackback to many other blogging platforms, I normally have to grab a specific trackback URL from their posts. It is a little inconvenient, but I still do it.

Typepad & Moveable Type Users – Are You Whispering About Me?

That is what it seems like anyway…

Typepad & Moveable Type blogs can receive trackbacks, so I am sure they are meant to be able to send them as well, maybe with auto detection but I have a feeling they don’t offer that functionality.

So you probably have to send a trackback manually filling in a field in your posting form. I am not going to register with Typepad just to write a tutorial on how to do it, but I would gladly link to one.

Having just done a search, I couldn’t find a simple tutorial teaching people how to send a trackback from Typepad to different blogging platforms. It seems like a no-brainer article to have on the first page of results.

So please someone write a tutorial so I can link to it

This blog post was inspired by Amy, maybe she will write a great tutorial. She was lucky I saw her link in Technorati, but I am sure I miss half the times people link to me, either because they link to my domain rather than my content, or because they don’t send trackbacks.

Alternatively one of Mikes students should do it, or maybe lots of people. Mike has to rest even though he is back home, so I refuse to link to him if he writes it.

We are looking for a comprehensive write-up with screenshots.

Install Greasemonkey

Lots of people might have it already and I know 65% of my readers use Firefox. If you don’t have it already, it is extremely useful, and there are thousands of user scripts for it.

Install Blogger Trackback

After you have Greasemonkey installed, install the appropriate script – the developer says both can co-exist, but I haven’t tested that.

If you are using New Blogger, you can use this trackback script for greasemonkey.

If you are using old blogger, there is an older script available

Trackback In Blogger

I think the picture near enough says it all

Yes that is a box within the Blogger interface where you just add a trackback URL.

After you publish, you even get a nice confirmation that it was sent

Del.icio.us

The script also pops up a window for your Delicious details, and tags your posts.

Pingoat & Pingomatic

Yep, it is meant to work with Pingoat and Pingomatic as well, though when I tested with Pingoat following the instructions, I didn’t see any additional visual confirmation. I didn’t test Pingomatic.

I am not 100% sure this part worked for me, I need to do some more testing

Good But No Banana… yet!

It isn’t a perfect solution as is, because it is using the blog name for the link URL on the receiving end, rather than the blog post title.
It should be possible to hack the Greasemonkey script to use your post title, so that it uses the post title for links on the receiving end.

I will see what I can do to get a modified version made available

In this first part of this quick series, I am going to cover Haloscan.

Create A Haloscan Account

First of all you need to register with Haloscan.

You do not need to integrate Haloscan with your blog to use their trackback system

I would actually currently advise you not to integrate Haloscan for comments and trackback display on your blog for a number of reasons.

• Blogger can now display linkbacks
• You can remove nofollow from the trackback links on blogger
• It is harder to migrate to WordPress or other blogging platform if all your comments are in Haloscan.

Send Trackback With Haloscan

It is important that links actually exist, and in this particular case when this post is published a link will exist, otherwise comment spam plugins might intercept the trackback.

There is also what I would look on as a bug with Haloscan, they use the blog title as the link for the trackback, and not the post name. The blog post title appears in bold above the trackback. Knowing this you can make sure you have some keywords for a good link by including them in the blog title rather than the post title, though the text entry field is quite small.

This is how a trackback appears on my blog below the comments box.

So if you are using Blogger, or a blogging platform that doesn’t seem to send trackbacks correctly, Haloscan is one option you can use to send a trackback.

When I checked on Wednesday due to timezones it hadn’t been published yet, Thursday I was so buried in code, themes and plugins I didn’t spot it being published (yes I need more vanity Google Alerts), and so I am linking through to it today.

One thing it definitely highlights is the advantage of real genuine trackbacks over Technorati.
Technorati shows I have gained 4000 links in the last 3 months, and the number is escalating, mainly as Technorati find more and more additional feeds and blogroll links.

Google need to provide a decent trackback function with Blogger. You can use a 3rd party such as Haloscan, but that is very inconvenient. Maybe someone needs to create a service “I will ping your blogger” which subscribes to a blogspot feed, and sends feed notifications.
If you use Blogger and have found a good solution to trackbacks, please share that information in the comments.

So anyway, one thing I really like about Marty is that each interview he conducts asks different questions to prior interviews. It is not like he is using a template and sending it to 20 bloggers to create the content for a month.

Did I reveal any secrets? Possibly, Marty asked me questions I had never thought about in the past – the answers will certainly tell you a little more about me.

Nofollow On Blogspot

I try to keep many of my posts updated as often as possible, and I believe that Ronnie’s guide on Tips for Blogspot is currently the easiest to understand.

Remove Nofollow From Blogger Comments & Trackbacks

Ronnie also seems to be extremely experienced with Blogspot, and is doing a lot of things I honestly never thought about doing, or even though was possible.

He has written a much more technical guide for those publishing using blogger on their own servers.

Processing Blogger Pages As PHP Using FTP

The example he uses is for parsing comments to remove link attributes such as nofollow.

So you can now share link love to your commenters on Blogger

I can guarantee you will love his comments policy, and the tips he gives are rock solid on lots of different subjects.