Search engine optimization makes use of many analytical and technical tools. Regrettably, there are so many choices that it’s easy to get overwhelmed, particularly by how many browser extensions are available in the Chrome Web Store.
In this article, we’ll go over 11 different Chrome extensions that are free of cost and the top choices in terms of SEO’s more technical aspects.
A few of these SEO extensions do have premium or paid versions, but each of them can still deliver robust functionality to you even if you stick to the free versions. On the other hand, no single tool, in our own humble experience, will give you every necessary piece of SEO data.
The All-In-Ones
These kinds of extensions bring together some SEO utilities into just one platform.
#1: SEOquake
SEOquake is something which offers data from crucial SEO categories, including link authority, content, and technical, and it lets you customize just what you’d like to see. Look through all the tabbed navigation options in the SEOquake results you get, and you’ll see that there’s quite a bit more than what initially meets the eye. In just one click on the extension bar, you can find per-page data, and there’s also an optional bar following every search result when you look in the search engine results pages.
#2: SEO Analysis
It comes with SEOptimer. It’s not nearly as extensive as SEOquake is, and yet it still has very useful information in a very attractive package. If you’re looking for an all-in-one SEOquake alternative, then SEOptimer is something that you should try. There is a paid option that you can pick, but even the free option has a lot of data points that cover many aspects of SEO, including social and usability.
The Technical Extensions
When search engines evaluate a website or page for its ranking, there are quite a few different technical aspects that they take into account. These extensions wind up all measuring different things, so you might want to give them all a try.
#3: Firebug Lite
Firebug Lite is one that lets you right-click on an area of a website so that you can view the coding used in the creation of that element, like how the headings might be coded, which links are no-followed or crawlable, and a lot more.
#4: Web Developer Toolbar
Web Developer Toolbar for Chrome mimics the original version from Firefox some years back, to a degree. It’s only a shadow, but it can still be pretty useful for many tasks, such as checking out which fields get coded as H headings, toggling CSS and JavaScript on and off, reviewing all your outbound links, and a lot more.
#5: User-Agent Switcher
It can enable your browser to spoof Bingbot, Googlebot, and a lot of other devices and browsers, all by changing the specific agent signal that your browser uses whenever it requests a website from a server. That’s handy for analyzing various device and browser experiences, on top of identifying cloaking issues, which is when the content that is presented to a search engine differs from that which is presented to a user.
#6: Link Redirect Trace
Link Redirect Trace can show you the chain of server headers before the final page loads up with “200 OK.” It will trace 301 and 3012 redirects, and even JavaScript redirects and meta refreshes. Once you know which particular server headers are actually in play, then you can take certain steps that manage your internal link authority flow better.
#7: OpenLink Structured Data Sniffer
It can identify all the various kinds of structured data that a page might have, ranging from microformats to RDFa to JSON-LD, among many other forms of assorted metadata. Search engines highly value structured data since it helps them interpret information from your site accurately in terms of relevance. If none of your pages of have structured data, then this is a great tool to take a look at how your competition is implementing it.
#8: META SEO Inspector
This will show you a basic “print” of a page’s metadata, including microformats, and Open Graph, noindex, and canonical tags, among much more.
#9: PageSpeed Insights Pro
The PageSpeed Insights can combine elements from the Google PageSpeed tool into just a single yet attractive extension that is simple to activate for any page that you’re looking at. Page speed proves critical, particularly since Google just launched its mobile speed update.
#10: First Paint & Page Load Time
First Paint & Page Load Time goes over much of the same terrain as PageSpeed Insights does. However, it will slice up the data to show you the weight and number of resources, plus a rather nifty rainbow chart covering the ten heaviest resources.
#11: Broken Link Checker
It will identify broken links of any website, and that’s crucial since broken links will create a perception of a low-quality site. This tool is typically the most helpful for any sitewide elements such as headers and footers. However, it can still be useful for many other pages too. It’s a much quicker alternative to using a crawler.