By Suzan Gray on 2008/10/01
Since its release in 2004 Quirk SearchStatus has been downloaded more than 500 000 times!
With 10 000 downloads from the Mozilla site and 4 000 from the Quirk site each week, it is clear that this nifty little tool is a real hit amongst Internet users - especially amongst those of the SEM persuasion.
With half a million users, SearchStatus is now the world's favourite SEO plug-in. This is pretty impressive when you consider that it was developed in order to meet Quirk's need to - in creator Craig Raw's own words - "look under the hood of a website".
The figures are an obvious indication of the popularity of this useful tool but:
- What makes SearchStatus such a hugely popular Firefox plug-in?
- How can you use SearchStatus better?
Why Do People Use Quirk SearchStatus?
In order to do our jobs as professional search engine marketers properly, Quirk faced the challenge of rapidly gaining insight into a client's website. We also needed a way to gather intelligence about our client's competitors.
To cut a long story short Craig Raw, Quirk's CTO, created SearchStatus a few years back to do just that. And being the open, nice guys we are, we released it publicly for other SEMs to use as well.
Admittedly, there are other similar tools like SearchStatus out there but many of them:
- Gather data about what you are doing with their tool to use for their own marketing purposes (upwards data pull).
- Use the tool to push marketing messages to you via the tool (downwards data send).
SearchStatus does neither of these things.
Actually, we are very proud of the fact we haven't tried to exploit the SearchStatus user base in any way whatsoever. We also guarantee no spyware, no adware and no viruses in our tool (as certified by SOFTPEDIA) meaning that you can use our tool without being bothered by pesky advertising messages or nasty viruses.
Add to that the fact that SearchStatus is small, lightweight and unobtrusive - and ding, ding, ding we have a winner! This plug-in can in fact be positioned anywhere in the browser.
Craig has refined the tool over the years with most of the improvements being driven by user feedback. You just need to browse the changelog to see how this tool has improved over time.
How Can You Use Quirk SearchStatus Better?
What makes SearchStatus so effective as an SEM tool is that it gives you search related information so you can view:
- The link importance of a site (according to the 3 main search engines).
- A site's traffic importance (according to Alexa, Compete etc).
- Other search related info in order to get a sense of the underlying effectiveness of a site's search engine optimisation.
At the click of a button, SearchStatus quickly lets you view useful things like:
- Google PageRank
- Meta Tags
- Alexa Popularity Ranking
- Compete.com Ranking
- Alexa Incoming Links
- Alexa Related Links
- Backward Links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN
- NoFollow Links
- Archive.org Info
- Whois Info
- Robot.txt file Info
- Indexed Pages for Site
- Keyword Density
- Highlight Keywords
In the latest version (1.27) we added the handy ability to view a site's XML sitemap without the inconvenience of having to leave your browser to do it in any complicated external tools.
Using the Information in an Intelligent Way
1. Lets talk links first:
The Link Report - This feature gives you a quick indicator of how many links there are to your site. It shows you how many of those links come from internal (onsite links) and external (offsite) sources.
Highlight NoFollow Links - Using this feature lets you know if any
website's links are not passing on the link love i.e. not passing on the benefits of the link in the eyes of the search engines.
Show Backward Links - This is another great feature which allows you to check all the sites linking to the current page or website/domain you are visiting. It gives you information for all three major search engines (Google, MSN & Yahoo!).
2. Next, let's look at indexing & meta data:
Show Indexed Pages - This option is cool because it allows you to see all the pages listed for the website you are visiting and in all 3 major search engines.
There is quite a lot you can do with this information, if you just think about it a little. Not only can you get a sense of how your own site is being indexed by the search engines but you can also do a quick check up on your competitors. Armed with this information you can determine what your site's content strategy needs to be vis-à-vis your competitors. You can figure out whether your competitors have more pages indexed than you and what their page indexing is.
On your own site, you can also determine what pages the search engines are not indexing and look at why (e.g. perhaps a technical issue on a key page is blocking the bots from accessing it properly).
Show XML Map: This allows you to see the XML map for the site you are visiting. It's handy to use to get a sense of how the website is structured and how they have instructed the bots to crawl the website.
Keyword Density Enter any keyword into this function and you can gain insight into the density of that keyword on that page. When optimising the page for search engines, it is important to make sure you have the right balance of keywords.
Meta Tags - This function gives you the info to make sure your site's meta tags are set up appropriately. You'll get info about title, body, h1/h3 tags etc. which you can then use to determine whether you need to optimise your site for better results on the SERPs.
3. Other handy stuff:
Google PageRank (PR) and Alexa info - SearchStatus gives you a handy indicator of PR and Alexa info from its menu (Be sure to check out the Newbie's Guide to SearchStatus if this sounds a tad foreign).
Show in Archive.org - This takes you to the Internet Archive for the page you are on. Useful if you want to see the history of a website.
Show Whois - This will take you to dnsstuff.com. This shows you the registered contact info of the website owner and is handy if you need to contact them directly.
Show robots.txt - This will show you the website's robot file. This file tells the search engines the special pages a site does not want listed because they want to keep them private.
If for some reason you don't want a page listed, e.g. to avoid being penalised for duplicate content, you need to make sure it is shown in this file.
On a competitor's site, it is sometimes handy to take a peak at their robot.txt file to see if there are pages you might want to look at but that won't get indexed by the search engines.
To sum it all up, if you are serious about making your website successful, SearchStatus is a great plug-in to have installed on your Firefox browser. After all, half a million users can't be wrong.
Not only will you get great SEM info from it (at the mere right click of your mouse) but you can also use it with complete peace of mind - knowing that you are not being spied upon.
A Final Note
The only potential "downside" (although we don't see it that way) to this tool is that you can only use SearchStatus on Mozilla and Firefox. If you don't use Firefox, we'd like to send you our deepest condolences. But, to be fair the browser's free, the tool's free - so what are you waiting for? Download SearchStatus and start exploring.
