It really depends on what strategy you are using. A good beginner strategy is to find keywords that have as few competing websites as possible, as in 20,000 or less, but which still have some decent traffic. Say, at least 1000 visitors each month (none of this is set in stone). Then buy as close of an exact match domain name as you can and build some links. It doesn't take much to rank this way, but it does take multiple sites to get a lot of traffic. But its a good place to start and my feeling is that this approach would be a good way for you to learn the ropes of SEO.

Ranking for sites that have millions, or even hundreds of thousands of competing sites can definitely be done, but it's a lot harder. I also may be wrong, but i suspect that you may still be looking only at the links to the page that is ranking and discounting the links to the home page. Both are factors.

Hey Monique. No follow is a value that can be assigned to the rel attribute of an HTML a element to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target's ranking in the search engine's index. So in theory a do follow link is better then a no follow link, and you should look for them. That said, countless SEO experiments have been done in which people have proved that the value DOES actually get passed and you can rank sites with no follow links. So I don't personally worry about it all that much. So long as you are getting decent quality content out there on decent sites, you should be fine.