I am launching a online business but when I type in the "keyword" I'd like to conquer the number 39,000,000 comes up in results. But when I go to google and do a link check(link:http://www.thebusinessesname.com) it only shows 163 backlinks. How could this be true? The second and third business have maybe 10-15 backlinks when I do a link check on them. Does this mean with a couple of thousand correct backlinks I can get to the first page?
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Is 163 backlinks alot? This is a bit like asking "is a full house a good hand in poker?". It depends almost entirely on what the competition has. If you have 163 links and the top 3 competitors in your industry have 4, 17 & 22 links, then yeah 163 is a lot. If they have 67,984, 149,983 & 43,499, then 163 is not many links at all. You can use the Yahoo! site explorer tool to check how many backlinks your competitors have. http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.XXXXXXX.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=s Copy and paste that into your web browser and replace XXXXXXX with the domain of your competitors. That will give you a rough idea of your industry. What this won't do is tell you the quality of the links, which plays a very large part in how search engines evaluate your site. Judging quality is quite a bit more difficult but nothing a few hours of google searching & scouring forum boards can't provide. |
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Just an FYI...Google's link operator is not an accurate reflection of a site's backlinks. It typically shows a small sample of the actual link count. http://www.freewebs.com/paracha2/SEO-Articles/Google-Link-Operator.htm |
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Not necessarily. You have to take the strength of the linking sites into consideration. Basically, the page rank algorithm says, "There are 4,000 sites linking into site A, so it gets a weight of 4,000. Site A then links to site B, so site B receives a weight of 3,000 even though there's only one site linking to it. Site C has a weight of 500, and now it links to B, so B's weight is now 3,000 (from site A) + 400 (from site B) = 3400" If you want a full account of the page rank algorithm, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank |
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The nutshell answer: it's not the number of links, it's their quality. |
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Jay - I'm sure Rand could provide more information than anyone here - but, I thought I'd expound on Raymond Giorgi's comment because too many people focus on "Keyword #1" when that is not likely to bring you a lot of traffic. My highest traffic keyword brings in 15 hits a week. But, I have 100s of combinations of keywords bringing in less traffic every day as well. If I only focused on keyword #1 I would have a very small percentage of overall traffic. The best solution is continued blogging on Longtail Keywords. If you look at some of the research (the source eludes me of the top of my head) keywords with 3-4 words convert higher than other keywords and are easier to rank for. Someone searching for "awesome red bike tampa" is much more likely to buy my bike on my page "awesome red bike" if they find a page all about that. Ranking for bike would be terribly hard and convert poorly because they are using less buying signals in the search. |
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