Further to my recent article "link building top 10 tips", here are some free addons to Firefox that make identifying great link partners easy and fast.
I'd say again that find a site to link TO you is all about quality. It is pointless using automated tools to request links with sites without checking that they are relevant, but also are popular and have some page rank. I say "some" page rank, because page rank is only a loose indicator of a sites "linked-ness" and should be treated as such. So, I'm quite happy to get a link from a site with any page rank above zero, quite pleased if it has page rank of 4+ and delighted if 6+. The point being, I will accept a link from any site where PR is greater than zero, as long as they are relevant!
On to the tools. Download the free FireFox browser, then download these two addons:
SEO Quake
This little add on allows you to see additional information when using search engines to find potential link partners. Sure, all this information can be found elsewhere, but to have it all displayed right next to the listing is a great time saver.
For example simply do a search for "internet marketing consultant" and you quickly see the Page Rank of all the sites, their popularity and incoming links.
SEO link analysis
This second tool shows Page Rank, linktext and nofollow information for external links to a site when using Google Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer. This is useful if you want to reverse engineer the links to a popular site.
For example, find the top site about "italian recipes," put the URL into Yahoo site explorer, view the inlinks, and then you will see a list of sites that could be potential link partners for your "italian recipe" themed site. Better still you can see which sites would be pointless to have a link from (those using the "nofollow" tag) and those it would be great to have a link from (those that have a good page rank.)