Firefox addons which are useful for search engine optimization while searching / browsing.

Foxy SEO Tool – Foxy SEO Tool is a free, open source toolbar that provides quick and easy access to a multitude of search engine functions such as Google Site, Yahoo! Site Explorer, Live Fromlinks. Also included are famous web traffic analysis sites such as Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, popular statistic aggregators like Quarkbase and WebSiteOutlook. You can check a site’s listing in important directories like Dmoz and Yahoo! Directory, buzzing Web 2.0 sites such as Technocrati, Wikipedia, Digg, Delicious and links to useful network functions like Whois, Geotool, Internet Archive, etc.

RankQuest SEO Toolbar – This toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensures the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

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Search Engine Optimization(the process of improving ranking in search engine results) is a complex and never ending process. You have to analyze lot of things like keywords, backlinks and so on. To do this manually is a huge pain.

To make your life easier, SEOMoz.org have developed easy to use tools

1. Linkscape - A professional quality inlink tool that uses patent-pending SEOmoz metrics. Inlinks, anchor text distribution and more.

This tool provides Basic and Data Detail Intelligence Report for Your domain -

1. mozRank of the domain – mozRank shows how popular a page is on the web. The more links to a page, the more popular it becomes. Links from important pages increase your popularity, and your mozRank, even more.
2. Links to the domain – The total number of links to this page, counting links from your domain and links that don’t increase the mozRank.
3. Root domains linking to the domain – The number of different websites with links to this page. When compared to the number of links to this page, it can reveal how the links might be distributed across the web.
4. mozRank of the subdomain – Domain mozRank is a link popularity score based on how the domains, rather than just pages, link to each other. It is an indicator of a how popular your domain among domains

2. Term Target – Helps determine how targeted a particular page is for a specified keyword by analyzing a variety of factors.

3. SEOmoz Firefox Toolbar – The power of Linkscape is now available inside Firefox with the SEOmoz Toolbar. Using this tool you can – Check mozRank, mozTrust and other Linkscape metrics in your browser get quick and easy access to all the SEOmoz tools and other PRO resources.

4. Popular Searches – This tool aggregates and archives popular searches from various sources. This tool also shows Top 10 Searches from All Sources.

5. Trifecta – Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain. It measures the number of sites/pages that link to you, the number of times your brand is mentioned on the web And how much traffic your site receives. With your free account you can run only one Trifecta report per day.

6. Term Extractor – The term extractor tool analyzes the content of a given page and extracts the terms that appear to be targeted at search engines.

7. GeoTargeting Detection – Discover how well your website is targeted to country specific search engines.

8. SEO Toolbox – A collection of FREE Tools that will give you quick answers and aid in daily SEO activities.

1. Strongest Pages on a Domain – This tool determines what the strongest pages are on your domain
2. Check Backlinks – This tool reports the number of backlinks to a URL, also shows a historical view of previous backlinks.
3. Check PageRank – This tool reports the PageRank of a URL and shows a historical view of previous PR scores.
4. Find Domain Age – Using this tool find the age of your domain and when it was first spidered by the search engines.
5. Check HTTP Status Code – Using this tool find out what HTTP status code a website is producing.
6. Check Indexed Pages – This SEO Tool looks at the Google, Yahoo, Bing major search engines and reports back how many pages you appear to have indexed.
7. Whois – Using this tool find out a domain’s registration information.
8. IP Location – This is not an SEO tool, but is very useful in determining the geographic location of an IP address using a bit of AJAX and Google Maps.

To use some of above listed tools u have to be registered n logged in. Also there are some features, which requires SEOmoz PRO Membership.

mod_rewrite is an Apache module which provides a rule-based rewriting engine to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism.

Why URL Rewriting?

SEO(Search engine optimization) – Static URLs typically Rank better in Search Engines than the dynamic ones.

Dynamic URLs vs. Static URLs From Google

User-friendlier – Static URLs are always more friendlier than dynamic URL’s.

Security – mod_rewrite helps you hide the parameters passed in the application.

How to use mod_rewrite to rewrite URL’s?

mod_rewrite is really powerful if you are familiar with the regular expressions which it uses. But learning the whole pattern syntax can be quite complicated, especially for the non-technical user.

Exmpale:

First create a file called .htaccess and place it in folder where you want the rewriting to take effect. In case already .htaccess file exists, you can simply add the lines to it.

Open it in a your favourite text editor and start with:

Above line makes the rewrite engine to switch on. You can now add as many rewrite rules as you want.

The format is simple:

“RewriteRule” is static text, i.e. you should not change. “rewrite_from” is the address which will be typed in the browser and “rewrite_to” – which page the server will actually activate. Both of these can contain “masks”, but in “rewrite_to” we will only use $ and will discuss more or “rewrite_from” part.

To rewrite urls like index.php?task=categories to categories.html

Meaning of regxp characters used above -

- ^ character marks the beginning. i.e. you tell the server that it should not expect anything before it.

- (.*) – This combination is the most often used and it means literally “everything”. So everything you type before “.html”

- $1 – This is a parametter, saying where the first mask should be put. If you have more than one masks you can use $2, $3 etc. You’ll see more in the following examples.

- Using “numbers”. You can easily limit the rewriter to rewrite if it meets only numbers at a certain place:

Complete example:

Note : Before rewriting urls, you have to remove any special characters from the text and its better to replace space with “-”.

References:
MOD_REWRITE for Dummies
How to: URL re-writing in PHP ?
http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite
Pretty URLs – a guide to URL rewriting
Hide .php extension with url rewriting using .htaccess