Ben Tremblay » firefox http://bentremblay.com/en The web, what matters, common sense Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:52:10 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 SEO-Quake review: website analysis in half a second http://bentremblay.com/en/seo-quake-website-analysis-in-half-a-second http://bentremblay.com/en/seo-quake-website-analysis-in-half-a-second#comments Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:39:02 +0000 Ben Tremblay http://www.frogstr.com/?p=236 I took the weird habit of analyzing every single website I go to. I do it because it’s so easy with the SEO-Quake Firefox toolbar (also available for IE…?). This toolbar contains a lot of useful information that get automatically updated when you visit a website and you can do a quick analysis of a website’s popularity within only a couple of seconds.

What’s in SEOQuake?

What’s better than an example? I took a screen shot of the toolbar while visiting ShoeMoney and broke it down in different parts (Shoe is my website of choice when it comes to examples I know…).

For statistics lover like me, we get this part of the toolbar:

From left to right we have

  • PR: PageRank
  • I: Number of indexed pages in Google
  • L: Number of links pointing to that that SINGLE page
  • LD: Link Domain, which is the total number of backlinks for the domain
  • I: Number of pages indexed in MSN
  • Rank: Alexa Rank

In a fraction of seconds, you can see if the website you visit is a serious website. I particularly like the Alexa Rank and the number of backlinks. These are usually good indicators of a website popularity. I know I wrote about the Alexa ranking and how it is inaccurate sometimes, but it’s still a good metric.

Then, we have some other interesting options:

From left to right we have:

  • Age: domain age (which ShoeMoney blocks so that’s why we don’t see it.)
  • I: The Delicious Index or the number of times the page was bookmarked on delicious.
  • whois: The domain’s whois information.

The domain age is provided by The web archive and the button will bring you to the domain’s history.

Finally, some very useful options for your own website:

Source will of course bring you the source code of the page and it is very useful to access the page’s source code faster. Then we have Internal links and External links: Internal links is the number of links on the current page linking to the same domain and External links is the number of links on the current page linking to an external domain. This can be quite useful when you want to control your precious link juice! Finally, a feature I really enjoy to do keyword optimization is the density feature. This feature will give you a lot of information about the keywords on the page:

This way, you can optimize your keywords by checking how many time each of them appears on the page. The keyword density tool can go to 4 keywords phrases, which is really cool because we don’t necessarily always target individual keywords.

Get SEO-Quake

So that’s it, I use this toolbar all the time and check it for every site I visit. It’s a little addictive to be honest and I feel like I’m missing something when I’m on a computer that doen’t have the toolbar. It’s free so there really is no reasons not to try it ;) Get it here.

]]> http://bentremblay.com/en/seo-quake-website-analysis-in-half-a-second/feed 63 Browsershots – Test your web design for different browsers http://bentremblay.com/en/browsershots-test-your-web-design http://bentremblay.com/en/browsershots-test-your-web-design#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:08:51 +0000 Ben Tremblay http://www.seohorror.com/?p=78 First of all, I know it’s a shame, I last posted 4 days ago. That being said, I want to let you know about a tool I use a lot when designing websites. That little tool is called browsershot and what it does is taking screenshots of your website in a lot of different browsers. You know how hard it can be to test your design on IE6, IE7, Firefox 2, firefox 3, opera, konqueror, etc. This will make your life so much easier and you won’t have to run 30 different browsers on 3 different machines or call your friends to ask them how your website looks on their machine!

How it works

First, head to Browsershots website obviously.

Then, it’s pretty straight forward, you enter the URL you want to test and the OS/Browsers you’d like to test with.

Then, you just have to wait for the system to take the screenshots. The time to take them can vary, but it’s usually pretty fast. I selected a dozen of browsers for seohorror.com and the estimated time was between 3 and 12 minutes.

Refresh, see the results and back to work

You should get something like this in the end:

You can click on the screenshots to see real life size images and it is a great way to identify problems with other browsers.

Perfection isn’t possible

You will usually notice some glitch with some browsers, but don’t try to be compatible with all of them. I usually concentrate on being compatible with IE 6.0 & 7.0, Firefox 2.0 & 3.0, and Safari 2.0 & 3.0. These are the main browsers and it’s important to be compatible with all of them. You could also analyse your traffic and see what browser most of your users use, this might help you identify important browsers to be compatible with.

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