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During the last week I have ported (more or less) the famous SEO for Firefox addon to Opera. Now die-hard Opera fans can also enjoy it’s excellent market research capabilities and enhanced Google/Yahoo! search results 🙂

In case you’re not familiar with this outstanding SEO tool check out the “Features” section below.

Download & Installation Instructions

• Download seo_for_opera.zip (22 KB).
• Enable user JavaScript in Opera (you can skip this step if you’ve already installed other user scripts before). Open Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > JavaScript options, and select the directory where you will put your User JavaScript files. I recommend you create a new folder specifically for this purpose and put it somewhere out of the way – you probably won’t need to access it very often.
• Extract seo_for_opera.zip to the directory you specified in the previous step. This will create three .js files.
• (Optional) You can also install two custom buttons to quickly access some SEO for Opera features. To do this click each of the links below and answer “OK” when Opera asks if you really want to add a new button. A new window will pop up displaying the custom buttons you have installed. Drag & drop the button(s) to one of the Opera toolbars to place them there (I put the buttons on the status bar).
  • Install a “Toggle S4O” button. This button will let you quickly enable/disable SEO for Opera.
  • Install a “S4O Prefs” button. This will let you access the plugin’s preferences from any tab.

That’s it. Opera will automatically load the scripts the next time you open a new page – you don’t need to restart the browser. To see the script in action just do a Google search (opens in a new tab/window).

Features

(The following section is pretty much a restatement of the corresponding chapter on the SEO for Firefox page. Sorry Aaron! 😉 )

SEO for Opera adds a lot of useful market research information to Google/Yahoo search results, including the following for each result :

• PR: Google PageRank. I’m sure you know what this is.
• Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org’s spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.
• Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Links: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain.
• .edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page.
• .gov Links: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain.
• Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page.
• .edu Page Links: As above, but only for links from .edu domains.
• Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs.
• Alexa: website rank based on traffic. Heavily skewed toward IM and webmaster related resources.
• Compete.com Rank : Another site ranking based on traffic. Similar to Alexa.
• Compete.com Uniques : Unique visitors (per month) as esitmated by Compete.com. Not very accurate.
• Cached: (Google’s site: query) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google.
• dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.
• Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.
• dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.
• Wikipedia : how many times the site is mentioned on Wikipedia.
• WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

Behold the mighty screenshot :

You can also click each of the additional links added to the search results to dig a bit deeper.

Well, I don’t think I need to “sell” this tool any more, right? 🙂 Either way, you can find a detailed description of the features and more enticing tales on the original SEO for Firefox page.

Settings

You can access the plugin’s settings either by using the “S4O Prefs” button (see above) or by clicking the “S4O Preferences” link that will be added to Google/Yahoo search pages. Here’s what the options panel looks like :

For each piece of data you can select one of three settings :

• Auto – loads and displays the information automatically for all search results. Use the corresponding “Delay” box to specify how long the script should wait between successive requests. I recommend setting the delay to at least 1 second to avoid trouble.
• On-demand – the link will show up in search results but will only load the data when you click the little question mark () near it.
• Hidden – that piece of info won’t be added to search results.

You can also enable/disable the highlighting of nofollow’ed links by checking the appropriate box in the options panel. The highlight colour is specified in the standard hex notation; the default (#FF0000) corresponds to bright red.

Note that you will need to reload the page for new settings to take effect.

Obligatory Disclaimers

I’ve only tested the script in Opera 9.52. It should probably work in 9.5 and possibly other 9.x versions.

This software is experimental and expected to be buggy. No, really. Moving a complex script from one platform to a completely different one is bound to cause some unexpected glitches. Use at your own risk. I will fix reported bugs if I can, but JavaScript isn’t exactly my strong suite so don’t get your hopes up in this respect.

Also, if you want new features, you’ll probably have better luck asking Aaron Wall (the author of SEO for Firefox), not me 😛