We all work hard at the SEO process - analyzing sites, gathering data, researching potential problems and identifying the solutions. Today's post is on how to work smarter and faster using bookmarklets for SEO. No matter your browser, these plug-and-play links will let you get your job done faster and easier, and look like a pro in front of bosses and clients.

The list isn't completely comprehensive, but it covers 95%+ of the SEO data points I retrieve on a monthly basis and a few extras I don't personally use that may be valuable to others. It also has a section at the end on how to make your own bookmarklets for any site, tool or service you use. To employ, just click and drag the bookmarklet links from this blog post into your sidebar or bookmarks folder and rename to whatever you'd like. I've divided the post up into sections so you can quickly grab the items you care about.

SEO Bookmarklets Sections:

 SEO Bookmarklet Dragging Instructions
Just follow the instructions from this highly "meta" image :-)

Site Indexation Queries

Backlink Data Queries

 Specialized Search Queries

  • #15 - Google: Remove personalization
  • #16 - Google: Include duplicate results
  • #17 - Google: Show results from last 24 hours only
  • #18 - Google: Show results from last 7 days only
  • #19 - Google: Show US results (useful when performing queries from overseas)
  • #20 - Google "Text-Only" Cache of current URL

Domain & Traffic Data Queries

Social Media Data Queries

How to Construct Your Own Bookmarklets

Here's a sample code snippet for the bookmarklet above that shows links from OpenSiteExplorer.org:

javascript:location.href='https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/'+location.host+'/a!links'

To reproduce the effect with a bookmarklet that calls data from any site, you'll need to

  1. Find a web-based tool that stores the webpage it's calling data for in the URL. For example, Google Trends for Websites uses a format like "https://trends.google.com/websites?q=site:seomoz.org"
  2. Include the initial piece - javascript:location.href=' at the start of the bookmarklet link
  3. Follow that code snippet with the desired webpage that contains data. For example, if I wanted to get Google Trends for Websites, I'd use https://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A - note that for special characters in the URL like the colon : you'll need to use the hex character codes (a good list is here)
  4. Next you'll need to call the current URL. The most common way to do this is with window.location.href or location.host which pulls the URL string from the address bar.
  5. You may need to strip out portions of the URL to get just the sub or root domain. In my example with Google Trends, I'd use document.domain.replace('www.','') rather than the full URL string from #4 above. This removes the www from a domain name if it exists and extracts only the domain portion instead of the complete URL.
  6. To combine the javascript code snippet, you'll need to use proper syntax - following phrases with +, wrapping in single quotes and ending with a semicolon ;
  7. The finished code snippet looks like this -  javascript:location.href='https://trends.google.com/websites?q=site%3A'+document.domain.replace('www.','');
  8. You can use a wide variety of Javascript commands to build all sorts of bookmarklets, not just those that call URLs or append data. However, you'll need a more advanced tutorial to show you that process - sorry!

Now you're ready to start building your own bookmarklets. We'd love to have you share any of your favorites (or any new concoctions) in the comments below. If you've got great ones, I'll even try to add them into the post tomorrow and, naturally, pass on the credit :-)

p.s. One I'd love to see is a bookmarklet that gives a pop-up of the current website's IP address and, for extra bonus, takes you to a Bing IP: search query to show other sites hosted on that address.

Update:

Ask, and ye shall receive! Thanks to crdunst for putting together these two bookmarklets to show the IP address and take you to the Bing IP Search!

  1. DomainToIP.com Lookup
  2. Bing IP Lookup