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.

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.

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

The intent is that you can tell Yahoo which content not to index, such as adverts and links to navigation and legal elements that are nothing to do with the content you want to rank for.

It has already been stated that this has no effect on link equity. If you don’t want links to count, you have to still use rel=”nofollow”

From the Yahoo Blog

I can think of lots of nefarious ways this can be used

• class=”this-is-what-the-user-really-sees”
• class=”this-is-my-ripped-off-content”
• class=”these-are-my-p0rn-ads”
• class=”I-am-not-a-thin-affiliate-really”

Just as casual internet users are almost totally unaware of the rel=”nofollow” attribute for links, it will take a long time before there is any awareness about Robots-Nocontent

Here is what some of the HTML I used above looks like

<ul class="robots-nocontent">
	<li>class="this-is-what-the-user-really-sees"</li>
	<li>class="this-is-my-ripped-off-content"</li>
	<li>class="these-are-my-p0rn-ads"</li>
	<li>class="I-am-not-a-thin-affiliate-really"</li>
</ul>

You see normal web visitors will get to see everything, and search engines whilst they might cache the whole document, the marked sections won’t affect rankings, good or bad.

There are certain internet industries that will no doubt love this new feature. Sure there are other ways around this such as using graphics, but I haven’t explored every possibility.

How To Display The Robots-Nocontent Hidden CSS Class

1. Go to and Install the Chrone Edit Plus Firefox Extension
2. Restart Firefox
3. Go to Tools->ChromeEdit Plus->ChromEdit. Select the userContent.css tab and paste the following code in plain text

a[rel~="nofollow"] {
  border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
  background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200) ! important;
}

.robots-nocontent {
  border: thin dashed firebrick ! important;
  background-color: rgb(200, 255, 200) ! important;
}

The first part of this CSS is the original from Matt Cutts to highlight Nofollow links with a pink background.
The second part of the CSS highlights content with the Robots-Nocontent class applied

It is highly likely that this functionality will also be added to well known Firefox plugins such as Search Status and SEO for Firefox.

Danny Sullivan as usual has a good writeup on Robots-Nocontent.
Threadwatch has a slightly different perspective.

Also check out:- Andy Beal, WebProNews, FinalTag, John Andrews, Mashable & Techmeme

I use quite a lot of screenshots when blogging as I find the old saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” very appropriate.
Michel Fortin also pointed out in his top plugins and blogging tips article today how graphic icons with each post help with clickthrough. He has been using eye tracking software to prove it, and is a fanatical tester.

No Excerpts = Less Comments?

This concept just came to me while writing this post, maybe I will write about it again tomorrow in more detail.

I use full content on the front page currently because I like the idea of having my cupboard open to encourage people to read what I have written, like it, and thus subscribe.

The vast majority of my readers are via subscription, thus when they click through, they read the single permalink page, which has a comment box.

I do however get a large amount of casual traffic. If they click through to the front page, and get to read 10 articles, they are less inclined to read the comments on a post, where typically on my best content, there is a lot more discussion, that often is worth more than the original post.

Maybe there is a measurable benefit in only showing excerpts in increased comments from more casual readers, and readers on their 2nd page view. They wouldn’t have to take an additional action to place a comment.

The problem is in testing this you introduce more variables, because you might get more or less subscribers by showing less content.

Enough of the wandering mind…

Pictures in Communication

I have had a few people mention that my pages don’t look quite right. I had done a number of tests using both Firefox and Internet explorer, and had continued to do so. Some things aren’t perfect under Internet Explorer, but I am not a designer so I will have to live with them and tweak things as they go.

I was shocked when I saw this

Michel dropped me an email today with a screenshot attached (I have reduced it in size)

I think Michel might be using Internet Explorer, I primarily use Firefox, and only check things on IE typically when I am playing with page layout. I didn’t think about how a plugin might break under a different browser.

This is how this looks under Firefox

By communicating with a picture, I was able to fix the problem in about 2 minutes by simply switching off the plugin and clearing my cache.

As a p.s. I think both me and Michel use a little tool called SnagIt for grabbing quick screenshots. I am not an affiliate in any way, and I still find bugs with it (scrolling pages never seems to work), but find what it does do very useful.

The only time I actually test the Compete Toolbar is when I get an upgrade for it. Firefox detects a new upgrade, downloads it, and switches the toolbar on automatically from its default state on my computer – off.

The reason I keep it switched off is because with the Compete Toolbar switched on, Google Reader doesn’t work. It has been a good 3 months since Paul noted a problem. I just downloaded a new version, and again it doesn’t work with Google Reader on my system.

Compete Statistics

I have been disappointed with Compete Statistics for some time, especially within various niches that are technology related.

I decided to do a little roundup of blogs in the SEO SEM & Make Money Niche – no disrespect to anyone I missed out, page load time is going to suck anyway with all these images. Some sites I checked out and they fell into line with others which have similar Alexa traffic, so I just kept one example.

Problogger.net

Current Alexa Rating:- 2309

Shoemoney.com

Current Alexa Rating:- 1281

Graywolf

Current Alexa Rating:- 4993

Pronet Advertising

Current Alexa Rating:- 10015

Search Engine Journal

Current Alexa Rating:- 4264

John Battelle’s Search Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7684

Search Engine Watch

Current Alexa Rating:- 957

TopRank Blog

Current Alexa Rating:- 7610

Andy Beard

Current Alexa Rating:- 32K going on 20k

Statistics Analysis

The Alexa stats just don’t tie up with the Compete stats, even in a similar niche. Why do SEJ and SEW do so much better than Problogger and Shoemoney on Compete scores when both have very high (and legitimate) Alexa scores?
John Battelle stats are fascinating – he has a huge number of subscribers based on his recent stats from a few days ago after Google Reader was included but his Alexa score and number of comments doesn’t match. John seems to have a different kind of reader.

Do corporate intranets and default feeds on start pages (before you sign up) get somehow added to subscriber data?

I have always looked on the number of comments as being a good indication for blogs as to whether Alexa data is consistant, and generally within this niche it is, with the exception of John Battelles stats. I can think of reasons for that, as he is a “trusted” news source.

It should also be noted that Compete is a relatively new service, younger than all of the sites listed. I didn’t include SearchEngineLand specifically because it is a new site and thus might not have been a fair comparison.

As for my own data… wow, I am in the top 1 million now for Compete.

I feel much more inclined to use Alexa data as an indicator over Compete, not only because I can actually use it without breaking Google Reader, but also because the statistics for Alexa at least seem to have some level of consistency.

Time to close Firefox to switch Compete off again until the next update.

Update: I have now added Quantcast figures

Quantcast

Quantcast is a strange entity, in that the figures for traffic can be highly accurate. I know the figures they have for my site are 100% accurate. The reason they have exact data for my site is because I have been running their tracking code on my site for the last month and have my site registered with them.

For sites that aren’t registered and running the tracking code, the data is fairly weak – I am not sure where they get the data from, but it seems to be fairly dubious.

Its another piece of code you end up placing in the footer of your site, and I am sure the tin-foil hat brigade are not too happy about sharing everything about their sites, but it seems Quantcast get the data even if you don’t use their tracking code. It is probably best to register and then decide which data to display.
Lots of data isn’t always displayed for lower ranked sites – that certainly seems to be the case with this site.

From the Quantcast FAQ

How can I fix my site profile?

There is a sure-fire way to improve the accuracy of these numbers: by placing a measurement pixel on your site. Add a pixel and let our technology do the rest. Within just a few days you’ll see more refined, accurate and representative numbers for your site’s audience.

How accurate their ratings are for sites that experience a growth in traffic are unknown, and the drops in reported traffic on some sites are strange. Where you host seems to make a difference with how much data they have if you don’t have the code installed.

Update2: Conversion Rater has been doing a similar analysis trying to create a rankings table based on this data. Unfortunately it isn’t taking into account why some of the metrics data might be totally inaccurate, such as sites not registered with Quantcast.
Clarification: Pat does mention screwy data for sites not including Quantcast code, but the way he says it suggests that this is affecting those on his list that have a 15,000,000 rating. Of the 16 sites on the list, only 4 might have registered with Quantcast. It is just not worth using the figure. Comepete seems to be all over the place as well, with 6 sites not having any data at all.