This is a guest blog post by Peter Meinertzhagen, an SEO Consultant based in Oxfordshire, UK. Having come into the industry from teaching he’s passionate about training, development, and dispelling the myth that SEO has to be complicated.

The browser is the window to the world of the web which those of us working in online marketing use as a our primary and most used tool – and as an SEO, a tool through which you can gather vast amounts of the data and information you need to do your job. I will be covering my four most used FireFox and Chrome extensions and detailing just what makes them so darn useful!

1. SEOmoz MozBar

The MozBar is provided by SEOmoz and has useful functionality whether or not you’re a paid subscriber. As a free user, it can give you a toolbar which shows you the domain authority, mozRank and page authority of the page you are on, but it will only tell you the amount of links and linking root domains if you’re a subscriber and signed in. At the click of a button it can take you straight to Open Site Explorer to look more deeply at the backlink profile (and link/social metrics). You also get a nice SERP (search engine result pages) overlay giving you the same information, underneath each result in the SERP. It is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

2. Redirect Path

Redirect Path is a Chrome extension from Ayima which is an HTTP Header and Redirect checker. It’s incredibly useful for discovering all of the redirects that happen on a page. The image above shows the Redirect Path when visiting gettingmoreawesome.com – a 301 redirect occurs taking us to the www version of the URL.

3. Google Ordered Lists

Google Ordered Lists is a very simple extension which puts a number to a result in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page) so when you’re looking up the ranking of a page for a specific query you don’t have to waste your time counting! SEOQuake below provides this functionality also, but I don’t always have SEOQuake enabled (there’s only such information a man can handle) so this unobtrusive plugin finds a use. It is available for both Chrome and Firefox.

4. SEOQuake

SEOQuake is like a more extreme version of the MozBar, giving huge amounts of information on a web page (both in a toolbar and in the SERP’s). The screenshot shows a small selection of the information it can provide: from PageRank, to domain age, to the number of indexed pages, SeoQuake gives you an immediate peek at really valuable information which you’d have had to fetch from a number of different sources.

These are four that I use most often – what others would you recommend? Let me know in the comments below.