Let me assume that you have already decided to make blogging a valuable marketing tool to promote your small business but you suddenly realize that it is eating up more time than you ever expected. If you are new to blogging or SEO world and experimenting with your skills, then you will find this post extremely useful.

Here is my top list of blogging and SEO tools running on Firefox browser, which will surely make your life easier.

1. Web Developer Toolbar

No doubts that the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar is one of the most popular tools you can have for web design. If you need to test the design and layout of a webpage, you can do so by using this extension. It analyzes styles, enables you to view the site without images, shows the layout format, outlines tables / forms etc, validates the code and a lot more. 

My favorite feature though is Edit CSS. When you activate it, you can edit the CSS of a web page in a sidebar in real time and see your changes updated on the web page as you type them.

You have a new idea but you are not sure how it will look like on your real site? By editing the CSS in the sidebar you can quickly find out. As soon as you close the sidebare, all changes will disappear. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? Without further hesitation, I recommend you to give it a try.

2. SEO Quake 

When you come to the point of dealing with search engine optimization and internet promotion for you web site, then you can make a good use of SeoQuake. This Mozilla Firefox SEO extension will allow you to view a large number of search engine parameters, and analyze any single website you go to. It contains a lot of useful information that get automatically updated when you visit a website and you can do a quick analysis of a website’s popularity within only a couple of seconds.

Let me mention some of the parameters this extension displays: the Google Pagerank, the number of links for that site on Google, Yahoo and MSN, Alexarank, domain age and links that point to other pages on the same domain and external domains, the number of times the page has been bookmarked on Delicious.

It’s free so you have no excuse for not trying it.

3. Web Page SEO Analysis Tool 

We all know how important SEO has become in bringing in a targeted traffic to you web site. Sure, you still need to provide informative, well written, useful content, but at the same time, your website also must be well optimized in order to be found on the first search engine results page, and eventually to give you the best return for your investment of time and energy.

This add-on will help you take a close look at your web site, find its weaknesses, and then it will point you out the best way to optimize your blog.

If you want more visitors to your website, this extension is essential. It looks at keywords, tags, meta tags, URLs, and the body of your pages. Generally speaking, this tool will tell you whether your blog is search engine friendly or not. It’s simple and easy to use. 

5. Firebug

Another very popular web development tool for Firefox is FireBug. With FireBug, you can edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML, Java Script, and Ajax live in any web page. The beauty of it is that this add-on is very convenient and easy to use: just browse the web with Firefox and open the Firebug to begin working. The F12 key is shortcut key to open and close Firebug panel.

However for the purpose of this post, I want to draw your attention specifically on Page Speed Firebug add-on. You are most probably already aware that Google made a major update to its search algorithm, called Caffeine, and put an emphasis on the web site loading speed as an important ranking factor. More on this topic, you can find as you watch the Matt Cutts's video entitled "Is Speed More Important Than Relevance?".

Page Speed Firebug Add-on for Firefox

With the help of this Firebug-integrated Firefox extension you can evaluate your website performance, and then, you will be given suggestions on how to improve your page load time. It is surely worth you time because the faster you site is, the more people and search engines will love it.

5. Shareaholic 

I am petty sure that just like me you have been spending quite a bit of time spreading a word and distributing your contents on different social networks. Ever wonder whether there is an easier and less time consuming way to do that? You will find the answer in Shareaholic.

This Firefox add-on makes it easy for you to email, share, or bookmark web pages using 60+ bookmarking, social networking, email, and blogging services. Shareholic will save you tons of time by letting you go to all of your favorite websites, and thus you can spend much more time on your blog which you otherwise might have missed.

I will be glad if you share your favorite Firefox add-ons in the comments below.