About 18 months ago I began trying to figure out how to make money online just in case I lost my job. Well I still have my job but it is just a matter of time before I do not - we've been doing layoffs for 3 years now and I see no reason to believe it will turn around anytime soon.

When I started down this path I found Yaro Starak's blog almost immediately. And that was lucky for me because he introduced me to StomperNet. The Stomper folks are expensive and I haven't been able to buy into their program but their free SEO material is phenominal.

One of the tools the Stomper folks recommended was a free toolbar for Firefox. It was a good tool then and has only gotten better since - they've put out a couple of updates.

This tool has, almost single handedly, been responsible for Firefox becoming my favorite browser.

In my hub explaining quality backlinks I explained the difference between backlinks with the "nofollow" tag vs. backlinks without.  For SEO purposes you need to find backlinks without the NOFOLLOW tag.  You can find out which links are NOFOLLOW and which are not by examing the source code - look for the link code, it will look like this: <a href="....link...." rel="NOFOLLOW">Anchor Text</a>.  These are the NOFOLLOW type links that will not provide you the "link juice" necessary to improve your page rank and search engine results.

Most blog and forum sites on the web today add the "nofollow" tag by default - it's just part of the default software configuration.  For a blog you will typically see that links inside the author's pist will not have the NOFOLLOW tag.  Backlinks in the comments (the ones you place there) will include the NOFOLLOW tag.  Digging through the source code to find the NOFOLLOW tags is a pain.

The Firefox toolbar that I'm recommending highlights all the links on any page with the NOFOLLOW tag as you view those pages.

There are several other useful tools that come as part of the free Firefox toolbar from SEO Book.  Here are just a few:

• Backlinks to the page: backlinks to domain & to the specific page
• Page Rank Tracking: track the Search Engine Results ranking of any page for any keyword
• Backlink Highlighting: highlighting for backlinks for links with NOFOLLOW
• Keyword Highlighting: keyword highlighting for any given page
• Site SEO comparisons
• All of it free
• SEO Xray
• Several keyword suggestion tools

In summary the free tool from SEO book does everything necessary for a first level SEO analysis of any webpage you visit in real-time.  The free toolbar does everything on the page, graphically allowing you make a very fast assessment of any webpage.  A necessity for competing with that page for Search Engine Results Page ranking.