If you are into SEO or you want to know more ‘technical’ data about how a particular website or web page is designed, ranked or linked, consider using the Firefox web browser. Firefox has a slew of add ons for all sorts of purposes.

To quickly gather information about web pages, I use the SEO Quake, SEOpen and the SearchStatus extensions. The SEO Quake is usefull when pulling up search engine queries and you want to know more about the pages served. SEOpen and Search Status toolbars provides extensive search-related information about a site or web page.

These are useful if you are performing SEO work, or you want to know more about a particular publisher before you exchange or purchase links from them. They’re great for those of us who like to “trust but verify” a webmaster’s claimed traffic stats.

Check out some other Firefox SEO Extensions.

Are there any other ones worth listing?

As they say in real estate, it’s all about “location, location, location.” Who you link to and the types of sites where your links point to say a lot about your website.

Generally speaking, search engines interprets a link as a ‘vote’ for the site it points to. In addition, they also analyze the pages that links to a site. In other words, a link from a good page on a good authoritative site counts ‘more’ than a link from lesser location. And while you can’t control who links to you, you do have control over who you link to.

Why is who you link to important? Because if you link to a ‘bad neighborhood’ website, you are, basically, vouching for it. In other words, you put your site’s credibility on the line with each outbound link. Simply linking to bad neighborhoods could entail a penalty to your own site rankings. If you’re into link exchanges or you sell direct links, be very careful about who you link to.

Unless the theme of your website matches, you should generally avoid exchanging links with link farms, adult, pharmacy, gambling or online casino sites. These are the sites that can constitute ‘bad neighborhoods’. Because such sites are prone to spamming, search engines will likely reduce link value — and, again, possibly penalize your site just for linking to them.

PageRank and the link popularity of a site is a good measure of how a site is viewed. Although these factors can sometimes be manipulated, you can usually get a good idea of how trustworthy a specific page might be by checking these variables.

That’s why you need to know all you can about your link partners, so you won’t finding yourself associated with a bad neighborhood.

The goal of WebAdClassifieds.com will be to help create a more open and secure marketplace for link and sponsorship opportunities of every stripe.

While banner ads are typically tracked by the impression and rotated with other advertisers, you don’t generally expect to get any SEO benefit from them. Straight text links, however, are a different matter. When swapping or purchasing a text link from another website, you should expect and receive a ‘clean’ link directly back to your site.

Unfortunately, there are some unscrupulous people who sometimes perform dirty tricks when placing text links on thier sites. They will swap or sell you a link to your site, but then set up the links so search engines will never see them. You should always be on the lookout for link partners that might double-deal you.

Some of the most common text linking tricks include:

• Using the rel="nofollow" parameter inside hyperlink text. This essentially tells Google this link is not trusted, and should not be considered when calculating the ranking for the site it leads to.
• Using the "noindex" and/or "nofollow" robot meta-tags in the HTML at the top of the page. This effectively prevents search engine spiders from crawling specific pages (and the links on them).
• Using robots.txt to make search engines never visit certain pages. To find this file, go to http://[domainname]/robots.txt
• JavaScript or Flash-generated links. Search engines generally cannot follow these types of links.
• No redirected links that do not directly link to your website. (Ex: http://www.thierwebsite.com/adserver.pl?http://www.yourwebsite.com) Note that redirected links are typically used for banner serving software, so that impressions and click can be tracked.

Pay close attention to those whom you exchange links. Examine how other links are structured on sites you wish to advertise with, and avoid business with those who do not provide what they advertise.