Why The FireFox Accessibility Extension Is Awesome For SEO
May 29th 2009 9:00 AM
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I’ve been using Firefox as my web browser ever since it launched as an alternative to the crappiest browser on the market, Internet Explorer. One of the great things about Firefox is its many useful extensions and plug-ins.
For people interested in SEO and using Firefox as their browser, the Accessibility Extension is a match made in heaven. It has saved me a lot of time in optimizing my own site for SEO, and lets me see how well optimized another website is in seconds.
Here are my four key reasons I think the Firefox Accessibility Extension is awesome for SEO:
1) Header Tags At A Glance
Header tags are very important for both visitors and search engines. They divide the webpage into organized sections, making it easy to scan, read, and understand for both visitors and search engines. The H1 tag should be used once per page and summarize what the entire page is about. H2 tags should define the subsections of that page. H3 - H6 tags should only be used if it is appropriate to further break down the webpage into more sections.
The great thing about the Firefox Accessibility Extension is that it lets you view the header tags of any webpage at the click of a button. This is useful to quickly verify that your web pages conform to header tag SEO standards. I also enjoy using the headings feature to determine if another web page is optimized for SEO or not.
Here is a screenshot of Blue Falcon Marketing’s current headers from the extension:
As you can see, the site has been optimized for header tags with SEO best practices. I am considering changing the H5 tags to H3.
Now let’s look at another site, TopCanadianHotels.com as an example:
No, your eyes are not lying to you. This website uses absolutely no header tags. Frankly I’m quite surprised at the proportion of sites on the internet that have either no header tags or a poor example of them.
The headings feature of the tool is very useful to evaluate your own header tag SEO efforts, and those of your competitors.
2) Evaluate Link Anchor Text
The anchor text of a website link is useful for SEO and visitors. The best practice is to describe where the link leads to in its anchor text. For example, if someone is linking to my website, I would much rather have their anchor text be “Online Marketing Blog” than “Click Here.” Search engines use this to assess what the destination link is about. More importantly, so do web visitors.
Here is a screenshot of the tool’s output of my homepage:
The important column in this case is “Link Text.” This is the text seen by search engines and visitors.
3) Immediate Image Description Summary
The alternative description of images, also known as ‘alt’ tags, is very important. First and foremost, it helps people with vision disabilities understand what that image is about. Secondly, they also help search engines understand what that image is about, as they cannot ‘read’ an image. A very cool feature of this extension is showing a ‘Text Equivalent’ of all images in a website. This replaces all images with an actual text description.
This quickly lets you know what images are missing a description on your website or someone else’s. All images should have a relevant description for what they describe, using the html ‘alt’ tag. Here is a screenshot of my homepage’s right sidebar with the text equivalents setting selected:
4) Validate Your Website Code
The W3C or World Wide Web Consortium establishes technical website standards. Search engines evaluate how a website conforms to these standards. The extension provides a handy set of built-in links to the W3C service to report on the CSS and HTML compliance of the page you are on.
What web browser do you use? What do you think of Firefox and this extension? Do you use any other browser tools for SEO? Would appreciate learning about your experience.
