by John Dow

One of the biggest challenges in SEO (search engine optimization) is building one way subject oriented links to your website. There are two factors that make link building difficult. One is finding web sites that are of the same subject matter, and two, making sure the dreaded nofollow link property is not being used.

The nofollow property keeps the link from becoming live and grants no status with search engines. An interested reader could still type in the URL into their browser but clicking on the link is much easier.

There is a way to manually determine that the nofollow property is not being used. You can go to your browser tools and view the source of the web page. Then conduct a search for the term nofollow. If present, then it's probably being used.

Between search for appropriate subject matter websites, and checking for the nofollow tag manually, this is a very tedious task. That's why many don't bother. It's a lot of work for one link at time, and maybe not getting much results out of the effort.

In our constant search for making this process much easier and faster, we have discovered two tools in particular that are very helpful. They speed up the process and allow easier methods to determine if the nofollow tag is present.

The first is a double header. It helps you find appropriate blogs by keyword or subject and checks to make sure the nofollow tag is not present. This tool provides both of the major necessary ingredients for successful link building.

Another huge plus, this tool is free. There are two versions, one is the free version which is limited to 50 listings per keyword or phrase. The other is unlimited in number of websites that match the keywords. You can use the free version forever, if 50 selections will fit your needs. And using the free version gives you a chance to use the tool to see if it proves valuable to your link building strategies.

If you like it and find it works for you (and we're pretty sure it will) you can buy the unlimited version. In our opinion, you can't go wrong checking this software out and seeing if it helps. You can get the tool here: Fast Blog Finder.

The next tool we suggest doesn't find the websites but it does do a lot. It highlights the links of the page that are nofollow and follow. This tells you if the nofollow tag is in use. It also gives you the Google pagerank, keyword analysis, and other valuable information.

It's a browser add-in for FireFox, a popular browser in competition with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. We know a lot of folks who use FireFox because they think it's a better browser even without any add-ins installed. FireFox is opensource software wheich means it's supported by the Internet community and it's free.

And so is the add-in we are recommending. The FireFox browser and add-in do a great job in helping you speed up the process of link building. And the other features are just gravy. You can get the FireFox Browser here FireFox and the browser add-in SearchStatus here.

Between these two tools, your link building chores just got a whole lot easier. Even if you don't choose the FireFox browser add-on, you should take FireFox out for a test spin. It's a great browser and it's got some great features.