Search engine optimization or SEO is a system to improve the visibility of your website on search engines for visitors via natural or organic sources without the intervention of paid advertising. To take advantage of this system, you will need to understand how a website is viewed by an automated web crawler dispatched by popular search engines. Since Chrome is the most popular browser of choice according to Wikipedia, you will benefit from these Chrome plugins and extensions.
SEOquake
SEOquake by SEMrush is one of many free SEO Chrome plugins that offers an enormous amount of data related to your website. When you install it, you will see an icon to the right of the search bar and a toolbar below your bookmarks bar. Clicking on the icon will pop up an overlay with tabs of information about the page you are currently viewing. The toolbar has the Google index, Yahoo index, Bing index and Alexa rank for your page along with the number of backlinks to your page. These indices show where your page ranks on each search engine relative to other pages. Backlinks show how popular your page is based on other pages linking to it.
This plugin provides a comprehensive SEO page audit that gives a page analysis, mobile compliance and site compliance diagnosis along with tips for improvement. You can view the keyword density on your page based on one, two, three or four-word phrases from the original text and download the results in CSV format for further analysis by an external tool. You can also find a printable summary report analyzing keywords and phrases on your page with the number of internal and external links. You can also configure what items you want visible and how they are presented, position the SEO bar (top, bottom, left or right) and select the theme color.
META SEO Inspector
A simple tool exclusively for web page developers, META SEO inspector shows you what needs to be fixed to have a more efficient and flawless HTML page. An HTML page consists of many sections and subsections, some of which are not visible to the user such as metadata.
This plugin also analyzes every internal and external link and looks for missing information that describes each link. If there are images on the page, META SEO inspector checks for missing attributes associated with each one to comply with certain HTML standards.
LinkMiner
Links play a very significant part on a webpage. A backlink, inbound link or an external link is a link placed by an external site that links to your page. If the external link comes from a well-established, trustworthy and authoritative site, then it is considered a quality link by Google. A page with several quality links ranks higher than one that doesn’t. An internal link links to the same page or another page residing on the same domain. A page that has many internal links from other pages signifies to Google that it is an important page. A broken link when clicked leads to a page not found. Having too many broken links on a page reduces the page ranking and affects SEO.
LinkMiner is another free Chrome extension that checks for broken links on your page. Since the quality of a link affects the SEO ranking of a page, having a tool like LinkMiner will help optimize your page. LinkMiner provides metrics and social data on all the links of all your pages and allows you to export this data to an external file for further analysis.
Structured Data Testing Tool
Information about a website can be compiled into a particular form called structured data that is understood by search engines. Google, particularly, uses structured data to rank pages. The content of each type of structured data varies depending on the information being shared on the web. There are structured data schemas for a local business, an organization, an event, a recipe, a rating, a breadcrumb, a video, an FAQ, and many more. To learn how to generate and conform to structured data formats, you can visit schema.org.
If you use Google to search for an establishment, for example, you will find the search results on the left side of the page and a very-well formatted block of information about your search entry on the right side of the page. This data block is culled from structured data provided for the search engines. If no structured data is supplied, the block will be empty. The Structured Data Testing tool is a Chrome extension that tests the validity of structured data of a web page if the page supports one.
Using SEO techniques to enhance the ranking of a web page requires knowledge and skill. But with training on how to use these Chrome SEO plugins and extensions, you will master what you need to be successful at it. You will reap the benefits of your labor the next time you search for relevant keywords on your web pages when your page links appear on the first page.
