Calling all Bloggers!! Here’s another great reason to use Firefox, the faster, more secure, and fully customizable browser and soon to be number one browser! Okay, enough about Firefox and on to the real reason for this post (wink).

If you blog and write posts (about anything; it doesn’t matter the topic!) and want to make sure you optimize each post to the appropriate keywords, then look no further than the SEO Blogger plugin for Firefox.

SEO Blogger is a free Firefox plugin that gives bloggers a mini version of the Wordtracker keyword research tool in their editing window.

It saves you a lot of time, allows you to stay focused on your current task (writing that next great article), and compares keywords instantly – all without leaving the Firefox window!

The image below shows my screen as I’m writing this article and using SEO Blogger in the same browser window:

The tool sits alongside whatever blog publishing software you’re using so you can do keyword research and optimize your posts as you write. Then, simply hit “Publish” – and you’re done!

So as a designer, I was curious as to what grade my own site will receive and if I designed my site properly. And, yes, I am not ashamed to say that I did not get an A – at least by the SiteReportCard’s website. Am I shocked? NO.

SiteReportCard is a very useful FREE service that helps you identify broken links, website load time analysis, HTML validation, and much more.

My site, and any site that I create, is already built with web standards in mind and is XHTML and CSS validated.

But I wanted to see what this site had to say about mine. So what were my results?

Well, there were 6 warnings, a high load time, and several possible misspellings. However, here are what the results indicated:

• the warnings were not completely valid/useful so really not much to correct;
• the high load time of 190 seconds is misleading as that’s the reported load time for someone using a 28.8K speed modem;
• and the misspellings included my company name (yes, it’s spelled funny – Xtreme Designz), blog (not sure why their dictionary isn’t updated to include that web 2.0 term by now), the word Skype, and e-commerce (though there are several ways people spell this word, including “eCommerce” with the capital “C”). It did find a legitimate misspelled word for which I am very grateful!

So what do I give myself overall? An A of course!!

Try using this FREE service on one of the URLs on your site and see what results you get. It’s at least a good start to figuring out how to make your site better.

Oh and if you need help in making some of the corrections for your site, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’m around!