Going from the social marketing angle, rather than looking at it from the search engine’s point of view, I’d look for links from high trustrank sites – these would typically be authoritative blogs and websites in your niche, and the traffic will send over will be higher quality too.

One indispensable tool I have installed in my Firefox browser is the SEO Quake extension. (extension = Firefox plugin).

SEO Quake is available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

When I’m at a search engine result page, SEO Quake will gather various analytics data and domain data.

For example, when combining Google Blog Search with SEO Quake:

It’s a little small, but below each search result is the number of google links, yahoo links, domain age, alexa ranking, del.icio.us links and other information is shown.

[For the actual SERP page, click here]

I wouldn’t use a single metric as a guide, but taken together a high trust site would tend to be older and have multiple backlinks for the search engines.

If you’d like to audit a blog, here is the search string at Google BlogSearch:

And if you’d like to monitor specific blogs, you can configure the Google Blog Search alerts which function in a similar manner to Google News Alerts:

SEO Quake and Blog Search is a good combination for me to measure the quality of inbound links.

If you’d prefer an alternative to SEO Quake, I know Seer Interactive’s Wil Reynolds likes Aaron Wall’s SEO for Firefox extension.

You can find the link for SEO for Firefox.

For more SEO advice, you can also check out Aaron’s SEO Book.

And my copy of FireFox has probably seen it’s fair share of abuse.

• With about 10 plugins and 400 bookmarks, it’s now chugging along.
• Downloads take about 10 seconds to initiate.
• WordPress (especially PHP processing) is a little buggy. I’ve lost a number of good posts already…

So you might say things are a little….slow?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not soley dependent on Firefox.

By necessity, I use 3 browsers:

• Internet Explorer: because about 50% of blog visitors use that browser (and it displays differently from FireFox at times)
• FireFox: what I really like are the extensions available, especially this SEO plugin I recently installed.
• And now Flock!

How’s Flock (currently still in beta) different?

It’s intended to be a blogging-friendly Mozilla-based browser.

Here’s some info from Flock.com:

It’s a fast browser and I’ve used it for filing my blog posts a number of times.

It also supports extensions and are compatible with some FireFox ones.

According to the extensions page, it states:
Very soon you will be able to add your favorite extensions and we’ll convert them on the fly for you. Extensions written for other platforms can still be used in the Flock browser, but there is no guarantee that they will work correctly.

Here’re some of the more interesting extensions I’ve found:

• Web Developer

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

• FlashGot

Enables Flock, Firefox, Mozilla Suite, Netscape and Thunderbird to handle single and massive (“all” and “selection”) downloads using the most popular external download managers for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and FreeBSD (dozens currently supported, see Extension’s Home Page for details). FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to synthetize full media galleries in one page, from serial contents originally scattered on several pages, for easy and fast “download all”.

• Performancing

Performancing for Flock is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Flock. Features include:

• Works with all major blog software
• Easy WYSIWYG Editing
• Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support Once installed, just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right of your browser window to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your WordPress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.

I know a number of bloggers who use performancing, though because of the nature of my tag plugins using the native WP editor works better for me.

• Hyperwords

Makes every word on the web interactive for References, Search, Blog, Tag, Translate, Map look-up, Shopping, Email & more all in a single click.

• Technorati Topbar

The Technorati topbar lets you to search Technorati for conversations about blogs or the links you find in them. Technorati is a search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere — the world of weblogs. See the Flock wiki for more information

• Dai.sy

Turn Any Web Space into a Meeting Place. With it you can:

• MEET your fellow website visitors
• SHARE with them any folder on your PC Leave a
• BLOG for those that come After you With
• FULL MULTIMEDIA capabilities and socially designed for a simple and natural human interactive experience.
• NO Sign-Up or Membership Required.
• NO Costs.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

• Adsense Notifier

Displays your adsense earnings on the statusbar.

As you’re revving up your browser to go into overdrive, do install a sensible number of plugins (5-10 would be ideal. Having 100 installed might cripple it!)

You can get Flock from the Flock download page. A new beta 0.7.6 has just been released (which prompted this post!)
Anyone else using Flock? How’ve you found it?