I’ve been reviewing a lot of small and medium businesses sites in the Rochester, NY area lately.  Many of these sites are done in WordPress.   Even though people are using  SEO tools, like Yoast SEO, I’m finding lots of room for improvement by doing a quick best practices check.

Doing a quick audit is much easier if you have some basic extensions loaded into your Chrome browser.

Here are some simple tools that I currently use to help quickly find and capture basic opportunities.   I am currently doing most of my work on a Samsung Chromebook 3 which means I use Chrome extensions a lot!

Helpful Chrome Extensions for Simple Site Checks

1. Block Yourself From Analytics – Very handy.  Allows you to selectively block Google Analytics from recording your visits.  You can selectively add sites from the button.  I like this better than the Analytics opt out plugins because there are times when I want to test directly.  I also don’t want to opt out of everyone’s Analytics all the time.
2. SEO Meta in 1 Click – This has been a super helpful tool!  There are a lot of analysis tools and services to check meta tags , but this one is both super convenient , and it shows “H” tags .  This tool shows you a quick view of the most important parts of the page for SEO in a separate popup window.   Very helpful for your own site, and very educational to use on other sites.
3. BuiltWith Technology Profiler
   

   BuiltWith shows WordPress plugins and themes used to build the Cazbah.net site

    – “Hey, I really wish I knew how they built that cool page!”  With this tool you get a breakdown of all the technology that went into the page .  From re-marketing tags to WordPress plugins, you get a very comprehensive breakdown.  SimilarTech Prospecting plugin is a similar service

4. Awesome Screen Shot –  This is an image capture and editing tool.  Pretty much anything on the screen can be captured with this tool.
5. Google Keep Extension  – Keep is a simple way to take notes , todo lists , references pictures and more.  The extension allows you to quickly capture web pages of interest also.  Just click on the Keep icon and it will capture the current page and let you take notes about it .  I also use  Pocket for clipping.
6.  Web Developer – an all around helpful tool!  This is the Swiss army knife of site development.   Probably too much for the casual site owner , but with a little exploring you can find all sorts of useful uses.  Really good for viewing sites as they would be seen on other devices.
7. Google Tag Assistant – I’m a big advocate of analytics and this tool lets you see , and record , all the activity produced by all sorts of tags.   Helps quickly validate that Analytics, and other tags, are correctly loading and firing.

That is what I currently have on my extension bar – What’s on yours?  If you have some favorites let me know in the comments section!