So, like an impatient teenager shivering in the queue outside a full club, iCrossing sees an opportunity and quietly slips past the bouncer to join the heaving mass of sweat-sodden socialites gyrating on the dance floor. “I’m finally in the club” it thinks to itself, a club restricted to those who’ve published a “top seo-plugins” article. That’s right, we’re finally doing it! Anyway, tenuous metaphors aside, here’s a brief list of my most used SEO plug-ins and bookmarklets, along with a couple of productivity tools I find useful. As a Chrome user, it’s admittedly a little biased, but I’ve tried to make it as concise and useful as possible. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed anything.

A toolbar containing loads of web developer focussed features, a few of which are really helpful for seo, such as the ‘disable javascript’ functionality and the various other CSS, image, cookie and informational tools. You can use the ‘outline’ feature to easily display problem elements, such as images with empty alt tags, external links or whatever you want. This is the go-to extension for any curious SEO wanting to fiddle with a page.

Spoofs and mimics user-agent strings so you can view a web page, for example, how a Google-bot views it. Note - you'll have to manually add crawler user-agent strings yourself. Just go to the extension options and use the interface for adding new user-agents: it's really easy e.g. just add Googlebot 2.1 into the "new user-agent name" field, then insert Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html) into the "new user-agent string" field, select "replace" from the "Append?" field and give it a nice little abbreviated indicator such as "GB2" so you'll know which user-agent you're currently spoofing.

An HTTP Header & Redirect Checker, showing on-the-spot redirect details. Really useful for identifying redirect chains and other redirect issues.

Gives you a page’s current Google PageRank at a glance, along with AlexaRank, Geo IP Location, Whois, backlinks and indexed pages on-click. Most useful for the at a glance page rank feature.

Adds a toolbar to your browser showing you various Moz statistics (PA, MozRank, DA etc), social stats and a more in depth drop-down page analysis feature, which provides info on the current page’s SEO elements (title, h1 etc), inbound links, mark-up and other general seo-related attributes. Also features a more seo-friendly version of Web-developer’s outline tool, allowing you to highlight and easily identify various link elements.

Gives you an in-depth drop-down link analysis toolbar full of page, subdomain and root domain link information.

Identifies all the trackers/tracking tags present on a page. Useful for seeing which reporting technologies a site uses.

A cookie manager that allows you to add, delete, edit, search, protect and block cookies of all kinds. Useful for seeing info about specific tracking cookies, such as Google’s Analytics’ “_utmz” cookie, which provides traffic source info to Google Analytics.

Check My Links is a link checker that crawls through a webpage and highlights broken links.

If the current page is not the canonical version, the question mark icon will appear in your URL bar. Simply click the logo to visit the canonical URL.

A productivity tool that allows you to quickly save interesting articles/pages to read later.

Easily get data out of a webpage and into a spreadsheet. Most useful feature is that it produces and displays valid XPath locators for the element you’ve selected, so it’s really useful if you’re trying to create your own XPath formula.

If a table is detected on the current page, an   icon will appear in the URL bar. Simply click on the icon, select the table you want and either save to the clip-board or to a GoogleDoc.

Quickly detect the fonts used on a web page. Click on the icon, hover over an element, and the font is displayed. Good for aligning reports with clients’ branding.

Simply highlights any links that are contain the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Easily see all the technologies used on a site including servers, frameworks, advertising, analytics, javascript libraries and more.

Provides a drop-down toolbar on-click showing all the meta information on a current page, from titles to schema.org elements.

Detects and presents the microdata embedded in a given page.

Provides comprehensive information about the current site. Most useful for checking hosting location and domain age.

PageSpeed Insights analyses the performance of a web page and provides suggestions to make it faster.