As I have discussed in the past, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial function to assure search engines are finding your small business Website. For a search engine to recognize the value and relevance of your website, it must receive help from you, the creator of the page. Accurately optimizing your pages to make them “search engine friendly” can greatly increase your search engine rankings, traffic levels, and potential earnings from your website.

But what tools can you use to assure your optimizing your site correctly?

Mozilla Firefox offers many SEO plug-ins to help make your task as a search engine marketer easier.  Mozilla offers many SEO plug-ins that you can download to easily determine Page Rank, Alexa ranking, age of domain, number of back links and more.  You can also make use of these plug-ins to quickly get updates of your own site, competitors and any site of interest to you.  You can toggle these programs off so your browsing speed will not be affected and they will automatically update when new versions become available.

Here are a few plug-ins that you can download to help yourself become a better, more efficient search engine marketer:

• RankQuest SEO Tool Bar: The RankQuest SEO Tool Bar allows you to toggle between 30 SEO tools that include Alexa Rank and Page Rank.  You can also validate code, check back links, analyze content and explore meta tags.  This is a robust tool which provides you with most everything you need.

• SeoQuake SEO extension: This tool is easy to toggle on and off, it provides you with all the high level SEO details of search results.  You can quickly compare your SEO metrics to those you are competing with for top ranking position.

• SearchStatus: This application provides many of the similar tools that the RankQuest Tool Bar offers, but it also provides you with Compete rankings and SEOmoz Linkscape and mozRank data.  SearchStatus also allows you to quickly check ‘no follow’ tags on the page.

• MetaTags: This sidebar provides you with all the meta-information on your page.  It also displays link, language and a search engine submission menu.

• Flagfox: One of the most popular SEO plug-ins available is Flagfox.  This add-on displays a country flag showing the location of the website’s servers and provides additional information about the location and the web server.   This tool can also be leveraged for web development research.

Have you used any plug-ins to help monitor your SEO efforts? What have your results been?