Today’s fun mid-holiday search tip will let you highlight your search terms on the page you land on in order to:
- Easily find your keywords on the target page
- Analyze on-page keyword usage (prominence and density)
- Switch between the keywords to easier scan through the page, etc.
1. Use Google Cache
If there’s a cache link available in the SERPs, click through it to see the page with your search terms highlighted.
To easily jump from highlighted keyword to keyword, use this script which lets you navigate Google’s snapshot of the page using your keyboard. The script creates two hotkeys (“n” for “next” and “b” for “previous”) that will automatically scroll through highlighted search words on a Google Cache page:
2. Use Word Highlight
Word Highlight is a Greasemonkey script that works almost exactly as Google toolbar but is more fun:
- You will see your keywords highlighted on SERPs and pages you click through to
- You can choose (!) via checkboxes which words you want to be highlighted
- You can navigate from keyword to keyword using the handy navbar at the bottom of the page
- You will see a “heat” map of all colored search terms on a page:
3. Revamp Your Search Box
If you’ve been reading my FireFox tips for some time, you are likely to know how much I love FireFox’s search box for its flexibility and clutter-free functionality (if not, check out my favorite search plugins and also alternative Google search plugins).
This is why I was very happy to discover this FireFox addon called SearchWP that lets easily highlight and switch between keyword occurrence on any page. Words typed in the search box are converted into buttons that can be used to find them in the current page.
Happy searching!
