Safari Extensions for SEOs

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools have always been a popular use of toolbars and plugins in Firefox and more recently Chrome. Internet marketers use such tools to check the Google Page Rank of their own websites, those of competitors, and those upon where they may target their link development efforts. Tools like this have kept many from using Safari as their primary browser.

That should start changing as a few good tools have already begun to surface as Safari 5 extensions.

Simple CSS Hacks

The simplest way to check for rel=nofollow links technically requires no extensions at all. All it needs is some simple CSS in the user-customized CSS file that's been built into Safari for several versions now.

This CSS will reveal any links that have the rel=nofollow attribute on any website:

a[rel~="nofollow"] { border-bottom: thin dashed firebrick ! important; background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200) ! important; }

Like this:

Add it to a CSS file and point to it in the Safari Preferences, Advanced settings for Style sheet.

Using Safari's user style sheet is a bit inflexible. Making changes requires the editing of a CSS file and therefore it isn't easy to turn it on and off.

User CSS Manager

The User CSS Manager extension allows you to create and manage many different custom CSS settings, turn them on and off, and configure them to act only on specific websites.

So those are just some CSS tricks, where are the real SEO extensions?
SEO Extensions

We have two so far, both worthy additions to the Safari browser.

Safari PageRank Extension

The Safari PageRank extension adds a button to the toolbar with a badge that shows the Google PageRank of the site in the current tab.

It's not the typical green histogram that we're used to seeing in the various PageRank checkers, but it does the job.

SeoQuake

SeoQuake is a SEO toolbar that provides a number of important parameters that any SEO worth his or her salt pays attention to:

PageRank Pages indexed in Google Yahoo! inbound links (excluding current domain) Yahoo! domain links Pages indexed in Bing Alexa rank Archive.org site age Delicious links whois info SEMrush rank

The toolbar appears automatically for every site visited, after which you can close it. It will then appear again for the next page loaded. If that gets tiring, currently your only recourse is to disable the extension. It would be nice if this could be toggled with a button or a View menu option.

SeoQuake also has an option to highlight rel=nofollow links. You can choose to use this option instead of rolling your own with CSS. I prefer to be able to control how they look. SeoQuake puts a strikeout through the link text which gets in the way a bit too much for my tastes.

Have you tried these out yet? Are you holding out for any specific SEO tool features that haven't made it to Safari yet?

Let us know in the comments.