It’s an amazing free tool to help you in online marketing. It’s especially helpful for doing that “off page” SEO and getting some ideas on a variety of topics that may be of interest to you…

1. How strong is the competition in a particular niche you’re targeting?

2. What do you have to do to effectively compete in this niche… I.e. what’s it going to take to get a high ranking on page one of the organic search results?

When  you install the add on to your Firefox browser, you know the tool is working when you search for basically anything.

Under the search results the tool displays a variety of data that you’ll find interesting…:

• PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain
• .edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page
• .gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page
• del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs
• Alexa: rank based on website traffic . Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.
• Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

Here’s a glimpse of what you see when I typed in the keyword “dog food”. I have no particular “dog in that race” to make a sick pun, it’s just the first random keyword I came up with.

You can’t really get a good look at it on this blog. I’ll just put a thumbnail up and you can click it to see the full image… ok?

When you click on the actual results, you’ll see a bunch of question marks because this tool isn’t going to query these site unless you request it. But when you’ve identified a possible keyword niche, click these question marks and you’ll start to see what you’re up against.

Very handy.

If you’re competing to dominate the dog food marketplace, you’re going up against a site that has been around since 1998 with a Page Rank of 4.  It has 6 bookmarks at Del.icio.us, 9010 links according to Yahoo!, and even 10 links from .edu domains. It’s ranking on Alexa is under 50,000.

Unless you’re a “big dog” in the dog food marketplace, this one could be tough to beat unless you’re going to spend big bucks – or attack the niche via another keyword.

But with the SEO for Firefox Plugin, at least you know!