For people in the SEO industry, there’s always a lot to get done on any given day. For us SEOs using Firefox, we live and die by our plugins that help us analyze sites, look at data in an organized fashion, and complete tasks in seconds instead of minutes. It’s these time-saving techniques that make our SEO workflow more efficient and allow us to get more done in an average work day.

It seems that everyone has their own quirky tips, tricks, and techniques on how to speed up every-day SEO tasks - and I thought I’d share some of my few hacks that I’m quite reliant upon. While these examples are specific to SEO, they can be applied to any industry work flow.

Custom Keyword Bookmarks
Now while this technique is by no means new, nor is it really a ‘hack’, it’s a little known feature that I feel greatly helps everyone that is shown. In fact, it’s something that I’ve seen change the way many people use (or don’t use) a mouse in their browser.

Essentially keyword bookmarks work by associating a bookmarked URL with a keyword shortcut of your choosing. For example, when creating a bookmark, by filling in the keyword field, you associate that URL with a keyword shortcut.

(note: In order to see the keyword field, you have to actually go into ‘organize bookmarks’ and add a new bookmark.. i know… sucks, but worth it).

Now if I simply type ‘mmblog’ in my Nav Bar, it will load this bookmark.

Now on to the cool stuff: Smart Keyword Bookmarks for SEO and Beyond:

What if I want to create a keyword bookmark that contains some parameters? Perhaps ‘catch’ the url or words immediately following the shortcut I type?

One of the most popular uses of this technique is searching in Google with varying parameters. Let’s say we want to search google.com showing US results for the term ’seo company’. How would this URL look? Probably something like the following:
http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+company&gl=US

Now, the goal here is to make a keyword shortcut for searching terms in google.com, with US geo-location tracking. Let’s use the keyword ‘gus’ for this bookmark.  In order to catch everything you type after the shortcut (your search term), we must use the variable %s - here’s an example of how you should enter the bookmark with the url above.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&gl=US

Notice how in place of seo+company, I’ve put in our variable %s . Now when I want to search something I’ll just highlight my nav bar (easily done with control+L on PC, command+L on Mac) and type in ‘gus seo company’ or ‘gus best seo blogs’ - you get the picture.

You can do the exact same thing with any other google parameters. If you want to have a Google UK search (my favorite), create a bookmark with the location of http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&gl=UK and make the keyword ‘guk’ - or whatever your little techie heart desires. You can also keep adding parametrs like &hl= for language, etc.

Why not make a Keyword Bookmark for Wikipedia with the letter w?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s
now you can type ‘w george washington’ and get your article about the first US president.

Now to the really juicy SEO stuff.

Let’s say you want to find out some domain/whois information for the site you’re viewing? How about look at SEOMoz’s top pages lab tool (my favorite tool) to see the strongest pages on a given domain. It doesn’t matter if you’re on an inner page, this still works:

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages?uri=%s&linktype=page

Notice that I’ve replaced the uri=website with our %s variable.

I’ve keyworded this bookmark ‘tp’. All I do is hit control+L (highlights my current URL), hit the <= left directional button on my keyboard which brings the cursor to the beginning, and type ‘tp’ hit the spacebar to create a space in between my current url, and hit enter.

Keyword Shortcut Examples

Here are some of my favorite Keyword Shortcuts. Keep in mind you can make the keyword shortcut whatever you want. Remember: Add Bookmark, paste in the green URL, and fill out the ‘keywords’ field with your shortcut.

tp: SEOMoz Top Pages On Domain- http://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages?uri=%s&linktype=page
guk: Google UK Search - http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&gl=uk&q=%s
w: Wikipedia search - http://www.wikipedia.org/%s
gs: Google Site search (indexed pages) - http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A%s
gimg: Google Images search - http://images.google.com/images?safe=off&q=%s

Bookmarklets

Okay, so if you’re lazy and want to just click on a bookmarklet on your bookmarks bar for tasks you repeat a lot? Let’s say you’re on a page and you want some to plug in that URL to a given tool - be it SEOMOZ’s top pages, yahoo site explorer domain external page inlinks, etc etc. Using the same URL replacement technique with a little added Javascript, now you can create some really awesome custom popup tools.

Using the same idea as above, let’s create a SEOMoz Top Pages Bookmarklet.

Now let’s add this javascript to make this a true bookmarklet - having it pop in its own window.

javascript:popw=”;Q=”;x=document;y=window;if(x.selection {Q=x.selection.createRange().text;}elseif(y.getSelection){Q=y.getSelection();}elseif(x.getSelection){Q=x.getSelection();}popw=y.open(’http://www.seomoz.org/labs/toppages?uri=‘+escape(location.href)+’&linktype=page‘,’Bookmarklet’,’scrollbars=yes,width=1100,height=900,top=50,left=150,status=yes,resizable=yes’);if(!document.all)T=setTimeout(’popw.focus()’,50);void(0);

(Notice the orange is where the URL goes. location.href pulls in your current viewable web-page, and you can add any paramaters after in the second orange bit. You can also change width, height, top and left for where the window shows up on your screen, etc)

Now if we create a bookmark on the bookmarks bar (clickable) and add this javascript inside the location field, you got yourself a nice set of SEO bookmarklet tools.

Notice that just by clicking my ‘linkscape-detailed-view’ bookmarklet, a quick popup showing me results preserves screen real-estate and saves you time of opening another tab, going to seomoz, finding linkscape, and pasting in your old URL. (and no, you can’t get detailed view from the seomoz toolbar ). This bookmarklet technique can be applied to most web tools whose resulting url structure includes the webpage you are testing.

SEO Bookmarklet Examples
Here are some SEO Bookmarklets I’ve already created. Just Click+DRAG them UP ^^ into your firefox bookmarks toolbar. How cool!

SEOMoz Tools
TopPages StrongestPages Linkscape Detail View

Other
YSE - PageExt
WHOIS Tool
We’d love to see what kinds of Keyboard Shortcuts or Bookmarklets you create. Comment below for any follow up questions on how to create your own. Let me know if you want me to create any of them for you and I’ll add them to this post. Good luck!