Link building is an important aspect of blogging, specially when you want to make money online with your blogs. Link building is not a tough job. You just need some patience and some hard work. You can get some good links to your blog by using various white hat SEO methods such as blog commenting, forum promotion, article marketing and link exchange. I know most of you are aware about all these stuffs and I am not going to bore you with a long article about all these things. Rather I would like to tell you about a simple Firefox add-on that will help in link building and SEO.

The add-on that I am talking about is SearchStatus. What actually it do? It displays Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete Rank of any domain name right within your browser. So, what’s the big deal? This add-on comes with some powerful features that you can use to spy your competitors and to improve your own blog. For example keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and many more.

You will be able to realize it’s power only after installing it on your browser (Firefox off course). Just get it from here and install it. Once it is enabled, you will see it in the bottom right of your browser. You can also change it’s position to some convenient place, from the options menu. Now browse the web as usual. When you are on a web page, it will automatically get information about the Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and Compete Rank of that particular page or domain, and displays them unobtrusively on your browser. You can enable or disable these ranks anytime.

How to use SearchStatus for link building? I am sure that you would love to get some nofollow free i.e., dofollow links. For this you need to know where you can get one. You have probably came across some dofollow blogs and even directories of dofollow blogs. But, mind it, many bloggers are cheating fellow bloggers by announcing their blogs as dofollow, when their blogs are still using nofollow on links!

So, how to know who really offers dofollow links to it’s commentators? Let’s use this Firefox add-on to get some good links. Right click on the add-on icon and select the ‘Highlight Nofollow Links” option. From now on when a web page uses nofollow on links, it will highlight the link. Go to blogs and post comments when you see no highlighting on comment links. Similarly use some brain and get good nofollow free links from relevant sources. So, with this add-on no one can cheat you about dofollow links. Just continue posting good and relevant comments on dofollow blogs and soon you will get a bunch of one way links to your blog.

In my view SearchStatus is a powerful add-on and it is a must for every blogger. I am using it for last few months and getting extremely positive results on some of my new blogs. Besides using for detecting nofollow links, I use SearchStatus to get a quick overview of a new site. It saves lots of my valuable time. If you are not using it right now, try it today. I am sure that it will become one of your favorite Firefox add-ons.