Determining how many backlinks you need?

[Jayson L]

Is there a service out there for a few dollars that will determine how many backlinks you need to rank etc...? I know brad callen has some program, I just can't afford it. Is there anyone in this forum running some sort of special where they will evaluate keywords 3-5 in my case for organic search and give an idea what it would take to rank for them? I'm sure this is a major newby question, but hey, it is what it is right?

[Tom Brite]

You can do it yourself but it can take a while.

Use the yahoo site explorer to check out how many backlinks they have also also their PR.

Then you get some idea on how many you will need.

Thats a basic method of checking and the method i use when i only need to quickly glance.

Tom Brite

[marketseeker]

Originally Posted by Jayson L

Is there a service out there for a few dollars that will determine how many backlinks you need to rank etc...? I know brad callen has some program, I just can't afford it. Is there anyone in this forum running some sort of special where they will evaluate keywords 3-5 in my case for organic search and give an idea what it would take to rank for them? I'm sure this is a major newby question, but hey, it is what it is right?

get 5 links per day until you get ranked and then you'll know

[Joe118]

Originally Posted by marketseeker

get 5 links per day until you get ranked and then you'll know

Not a good idea

- You might be slower than your competitors with link creation and never outdo them
- You might be wasting your time with a too-slow strategy, or with competing in a too-hard niche

[Joe118]

By the way, your current linking strategy relies too heavily on social bookmarking sites like folkd and mixx, and also you don't have relevant anchor text...

[TheLeffer]

Originally Posted by Joe118

Not a good idea

- You might be slower than your competitors with link creation and never outdo them
- You might be wasting your time with a too-slow strategy, or with competing in a too-hard niche

It sounded like we were assuming that he already researched how competitive his niche was. I agree with what that guy said.

[Jayson L]

I'm confused? I don't have relavent anchor text in my social bookmarks, or what? I use ken fry's social bookmarking as one source and haven't done anything else yet. I'm thinking I'm going to create 50 web 2.0 pages with 500 word written articles that are on topic, then build links to them as well to give them more link juice. If I do this how many links should I put in the web 2.0 properties. I was thinking 2 each. I would only want one to a page though right? Not two going back to the same page? I am also going to go with about 100 forum links such as the angela and paul thing too. Any other suggestions is appreciated. I don't have a lot of options for keywords as I'm an insurance agent not a full time Imer that can pick another more searched niche. I'm in Michigan and have found that Michigan car insurance and michigan auto insurance seems to be the most searched and they don't get a huge amount of traffic.

[Joe118]

Originally Posted by Jayson L

I'm confused? I don't have relavent anchor text in my social bookmarks, or what? I use ken fry's social bookmarking as one source and haven't done anything else yet. I'm thinking I'm going to create 50 web 2.0 pages with 500 word written articles that are on topic, then build links to them as well to give them more link juice. If I do this how many links should I put in the web 2.0 properties. I was thinking 2 each. I would only want one to a page though right? Not two going back to the same page? I am also going to go with about 100 forum links such as the angela and paul thing too. Any other suggestions is appreciated. I don't have a lot of options for keywords as I'm an insurance agent not a full time Imer that can pick another more searched niche. I'm in Michigan and have found that Michigan car insurance and michigan auto insurance seems to be the most searched and they don't get a huge amount of traffic.

Look at the results you get from Backlinks Checker Tool - Backlink Watch by plugging in the URL of the site in your signature. You'll see that the links do no have relevant anchor text -- most of them just have the URL of your site as the anchor text.

[Jayson L]

Does that mean that I'm setting up my social bookmarks wrong, or is that how they show up?

[Jayson L]

That tool is awesome! I ran a couple of competitors and learned what they are using to get first page for a couple of keywords. This gives me an idea where to start! It's help like this that makes this forum useful.

[marketseeker]

first why are you putting hyphens between keywords in your meta tags?
you have 0 links to the inside pages that I looked at. on the insurance quotes post you could link to your home page and promote that page with some anchor text in the inbound links. get some blog commenting going but don't spam. that's a start. go to every post on you site and do some internal linking which is almost as important as inbound links. forget bookmarking and look for another way to get links. Think of links as salesmen you send out to sell your product. Don't think mass production, think quality.

[marketseeker]

Originally Posted by Joe118

Not a good idea

- You might be slower than your competitors with link creation and never outdo them
- You might be wasting your time with a too-slow strategy, or with competing in a too-hard niche

obviously you didn't check competition for Michigan Auto Insurance, if you had you would see that there is only 102,000 in title and the top pages only have less than 100 links on page. I could beat them with my hands tied at 5 links per day. But I see your point.

[Stella_Roberts]

Building 5 to 10 quality backlinks daily can be a good start. Once you receive some good position in the search results then you can make some modifications again. In my opinion the more backlinks the better.

But at the same time you should also keep in mind that, too many links too fast can be a recipe for no progress. The more natural the linking pattern and the higher quality the links the better.

[Joe118]

Originally Posted by marketseeker

obviously you didn't check competition for Michigan Auto Insurance, if you had you would see that there is only 102,000 in title and the top pages only have less than 100 links on page. I could beat them with my hands tied at 5 links per day. But I see your point.

Yep I didn't check his specific niche. I was just concerned that someone would take your advice as a way to beat a competitor in THEIR specific niche ...

[Joe118]

Originally Posted by Stella_Roberts

Building 5 to 10 quality backlinks daily can be a good start. Once you receive some good position in the search results then you can make some modifications again. In my opinion the more backlinks the better.

But at the same time you should also keep in mind that, too many links too fast can be a recipe for no progress. The more natural the linking pattern and the higher quality the links the better.

I'd really love to see some actual concrete evidence for this claim that there's a way to build links "too fast". IMHO (and its just like your claim, an opinion) there's no such thing as building links "too fast".

And I have strong evidence to the contrary. If Google actually penalized a site for getting back links too fast, it would be an ideal way to hurt your competitors; and Google has stated (or at least Matt Cutts has stated) that they avoid any algorithm that can be manipulated by competitors. So I'm very sure that such a penalty does not exist.

Now it *is* possible that Google will simply ignore some links pointing to a site, if they are being created too fast. But I don't think so, because without very complex intelligence there's no way to for Google to know whether any specific link is interesting, and thus they must examine as many as they can.