Become a fan of Distilled
Follow @DistilledFirebug is a Firefox plugin that lets you inspect the code on a webpage, giving you a quick way to check if best practice, SEO-friendly coding has been used. The ability to edit page code and content means you can create ‘before and after’ images of changes that you suggest to a site.
Something that I didn’t mention in the video, is how useful the app can be for helping people who’ve not spent a lot of time looking at HTML to understand the structure of pages and the purpose of different HTML tags and CSS code.
Other useful features include a tool to monitor all the http requests made by a page, which helps identify any linked images or external code files which are slowing down page load speed.
Firebug is one of the most important SEO plugins for Firefox. It’s an invaluable part of an search marketer’s toolkit, and I’d highly recommend having it close at hand.
NB: this is the first video blog post I’ve done. Let me know if you have any thoughts about the format. I used the incredible usability testing tool Silverback App to create the video.
Rob Ousbey
Very usefull tool and nice presentation of it! Thank you!
Hi Rob,
Very nice video; well pulled together and professional. I’ll be checking out Silverback myself.
And my missus liked the curtains too…
Firebug is a must have plug-in, not only for viewing source code, it can help you debug CSS problems in your blog, with YSlow and other adjoining plug-ins you can get performance and page load timings and more. Definitely a must have and I recommend.
Kudos on the video! Loved that your talking head was in the corner guiding us along. I’ve heard good things about Firebug but am always loathe to add yet another extension onto FF–but I think I’ll have to now that I’ve seen a great demo. Thanks!
Wow… thanks for the info about Firebug. I will download it now.
I’m blown away by how much you look like my brother. It nearly made me throw up with confusion.
Great video. I’ve never really looked at Firebug as a good tool for SEO but this has given me a bit of a kick. Whenever I’ve been speaking to a client I’ve always just told them how and why.
Great video! You don’t mention addons to Firebug, that can be quite useful for SEO. One of them is FireLinkReport – quite useful while checking link profile – you can see all links on a page and quickly highlight any link in browser window.
Excellent tutorial. I do have one comment. Given the size of the video it would be cool to zoom in on a small part of the screen so we could actually see the info. e.g. when you were showing the HTTP request zoom so that that part of the screen is visible.
Well, nice try. If the website is over flooded with complicated CSS structures you will not understand anything without the knowledge of html and css respectively….
Do you think creating temporary do-follow links on high PR sites using Firebug and then clicking on them impacts SEO at all? I notice that when I do this I get traffic referrals tracked in Google Analytics from these sites (which looks cool, even though I manifested them). I know that link building is based around indexed links but I wonder if this, too, even in the tiniest way, can impact SEO. Yes? No? Definitely not so?
@Chris Nope. No way.
I agree. At the same time, I do think it’s a little odd that Google Analytics picks up these clickthroughs as valid visits from the referring site.