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Firefox Extensions

By Chris Holgate in Featured

Many of my Click articles end up with me banging on about how good Firefox is and how all my readers should consider using it as their main browser over Internet Explorer which is bundled free with Microsoft Windows. Since one of the main arguments I use is the large number of third party add-ons that are available I thought this week I should probably corroborate that thinking by naming a few of them.

Add-ons (otherwise known as extensions or plug-ins) aren’t pieces of software in their own right but rather small bits of code designed to integrate with an existing application in order to extend its capabilities in one way or another. Firefox like many other browsers on the market encourage users to take advantage of this facility so that they can extend their browser in a way that suits them.

I’ve picked a few of the most popular plug-ins available, all of which are available free of charge by going to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamonkey/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/.

Adblock Plus – While Firefox itself stops the majority of pop-ups you can still find some pages have intrusive adverts which Adblock Plus aims to stop. Install it into Firefox and immediately banner ads and other intrusive adverts will be removed from your browsing experience resulting in less interruptions and faster download times.

FlashGot – FlashGot is used to download entire sites quickly and easily which can be useful for offline browsing as it removes the necessity to save pages to disk one page at a time. It also includes a build gallery function so you can download and store every image from a site quickly and easily.

Video Downloader – Watching videos on the Internet is certainly handy, but often if the video is embedded into the
page, it is difficult to save it on to your hard disk. If you install this add-in, you will be able to click one button to save it to your computer permanently.

Tab Mix Plus – This extension improves the tab capabilities of Firefox to include features such as duplicating tabs, reopen closed tabs and a session manager which can save and restore combinations of tab windows should Firefox run in to trouble.

Torrent Search – My more astute readers will remember me talking a bit about Torrents a few weeks back. This plug-in
allows you to easily search for downloads in more than 27 of the top Torrent search engines. This is a subject I’ll be covering more thoroughly in a future article so don’t worry.

Answers – Once installed simply hold down the key and click on any word present on a website to get details on what the word means along with related references.

Search Status – This is one of my favorites and a must for anyone involved with creating and promoting their own website. Search Status displays the Google PageRank and Alexa report of any page that you visit so you can immediately tell how popular it is – especially useful for comparing your sites against the competition. I’ll be giving a crash course in using PageRank and Alexa to promote
your website online in a future article, but in the meantime this plug-in is certainly worth installing so you can get a feel for these two systems.

It’s worthwhile noting that many of the above plug-ins are also compatible with Opera so even users of this browser may find it still worthwhile checking out addons.mozilla.org. Of course there are extensions that focus on Internet Explorer, but as I am trying to convince my readers to switch allegiances, it will be a while before I cover these in Click.

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Chris Holgate writes a weekly article of all things tech related. He is a copyrighter of the online Ink and Toner website Refresh Cartridges www.refreshcartridges.co.uk . These articles can be found in an archive at www.computerarticles.co.uk.

Everything you need to know about the future of search engine marketing you learned in the 1990s

By David Berkowitz in Featured

That’s an overstatement, of course, but the basics of SEO and SEM — the very first things you probably learned  — now are more important than they’ve been in years for bringing people back to your Web site. It’s all thanks to the new browser wars among Firefox 3, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, all of which are generally evolving in the same direction. All three, for instance, support searching from the address bar, where you normally enter a Web site URL. Chrome encourages this the most, as it doesn’t even have a search box, but the same feature is on all the browsers. The searches all are conducted through the default search engine you select (IE8, for example, doesn’t hold you to Live Search).

More importantly, these address bars all offer suggestions as you type. Generally, these are based on which sites you’ve previously visited, how often and/or recently you’ve visited them, and potentially some other factors. Firefox sticks to your browsing history, but Google will sometimes recommend other sites it deems relevant, while Microsoft occasionally recommends a page from one of its properties. The history is what marketers and publishers have the most control over, so that’s where the focus needs to be.

The opportunity here is retention. If someone has visited your site before, however they found it, you want to increase the odds that they’ll come to you directly rather than search again and potentially check out competitors. Ideally, you want to be found through search once, and then save the consumer the need from ever running that kind of search again.

For starters, you should optimize page titles. All three browsers rely on them. For instance, I ran a search that I tried when planning my honeymoon: “travel India.” I clicked one ad, leading me to a landing page entitled, “Private Guided Travel in India & Nepal: India, U.A.E., Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan.” I searched again and clicked on another ad where the landing page simply had the tour operator’s name. Now, whenever I start typing “travel India” in the address bar, that first tour site comes up, and it will also come up if I start typing queries relating to any of countries listed in the title. The site for the other operator never comes up. The same effect shows up across all three browsers.

Another important factor is the filename. I went to my blog and clicked on a photo of Usher from the Service Nation event in New York a couple weeks ago. The filename is usher_at_service_nation_nyc.jpg. Now, when I type “Usher” in my Firefox address bar, it leads me right to that image. With IE8, it actually goes to the blog post where that image lives rather than the image alone, even though I hadn’t actually visited that post in IE. Chrome doesn’t bring up the file in its suggestions at all, but that will most likely change over time. These browsers have a way of looking more alike, even as they stake out their own identities.

Reviewing these optimization basics won’t likely cause a huge difference overnight. As I mentioned in my end of summer roundup, it will take some time to learn how much these new browsers encourage direct navigation. Yet it’s somewhat reassuring that you probably already know the tactics that will put you in the best position with the new browsers, and they’ll provide other benefits for your landing pages whether you’re focused on SEO or paid search. While it may be frustrating needing to focus on a new round of browser wars, they can make you feel smarter for having learned all the tricks already.

David Berkowitz is director of emerging media and client strategy at 360i. You can reach him at dberkowitz@360i.com, and you can read his blog at MarketersStudio.com

© Copyright 2012 All rights reserved. Jayde Online, Inc.

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