100% its the "backlinks to page" that matter. "backlinks to site" actually has little or no effect and is really more of a measure of how much general SEO that website is doing so you can get a sense of how tough they are.

Also, always remember that backlinks aren't a pure numbers game, 30 backlinks from high quality, high pageranked pages can beat 1000 backlinks from crappy spam sites any day. Traffic travis' pro version has a neat tool that lets you actually view and analyze the backlinks another site has to see if they are easily beatable. if you aren't paying for the pro version of traffic travis, you can use Yahoo Site Explorer for free.

the key is to build links from quality sites, then build links to THOSE LINKS (imagine a pyramid of links with your site at the top). you get extra bouses for .edu and .gov sites

hope this answers you question.

In my opinion you need a lot more then just backlinks, I have ranked many sites above others who have more backlinks then me. With every site you create you should choose your keywords and do the following to help with your ranking.

1. Backlinks - but not with just any site, you need to backlink with other sites that are relevant to your site, also you need to make sure the link people click on to get to your site has your keyword, for example don't use 'click here' instead use 'click here for more info about keyword' or something similar to that.

2. Use the keyword in the websites title, example <title> your website page title keyword</title>

3. Keyword use in the body text of your web page. Make sure you use your keyword a few times in your web pages content, do not over do it though, just 2 or 3 times. You can look at your competitors sites (the ones that are already in the top 10 ranking) and see how many times they use the keyword in the body text.

4. It is also a good idea to use your keyword in your h1 tags but once again do not over do it, just once or twice will be plenty, remember to look at your competitors to see what google likes.

4. Age of website, google will see your website as a trusted site and not a spam site if it has been around for a long time.

5. Keyword use in domain name. Example www.yourkeyword.com or www.yourwebsite.com/yourkeyword.html

6. Links from social networks and book marking sites (digg, delicious etc)

7. More places to insert your keyword - h2-h6 tags, in your IMG ALT attributes, and in bold body text, in keyword links to other pages on your website. Use different variations of your keyword in these areas, only use keyword once or twice in each instance.

8. Number of visitors to your site, if you have more visitors this will help determine if your site is reputable and contains popular content.

9. Keyword use in meta description and keywords.

10. Keyword density - make sure there is enough content on your site to warrant how many times you use your keyword.

Hope that helps you achieve your top 10 ranking, it is a seo optimization is a big task, but well worth it when you get to first page of google.

I think per page is the one you should look at. 500 backlinks depend on where they come from, if they are high PR backlinks they will be hard to beat. If you make 1000 QUALITY backlinks then you should succeed, try searching for .edu and .gov backlinks will be a good start.

Oh, where to start...

I'm sure you'll be getting some solid advice from others, but I thought I would try to clarify a few things.

First, you're on the right track. The number of backlinks to the specific page are usually more important than those going to the domain. There are so many other factors, though, that what I look for, in terms of backlinks to competing URLs, are strictly the number of external links pointing to that page.

I usually overlook PageRank and internal links as a high PR domain can funnel lots of PR to their sub-pages, but if they haven't optimized external and/or internal factors for that page, then it's PR alone doesn't present much resistance to a well optimized, exact (or near-exact) match keyword domain name w/ a decent # of anchor-text-optimized backlinks.

Then I check to see...

- if their keywords are in their title and/or domain.

- if they have keywords near the top of the page and in H1 tags, etc. (i.e. have they optimized for those keywords or are they ranking by accident)

Secondly, (you probably already know this), but the quality of backlinks matter, not just the number of links. Meaning if your competition have links to their page from quality, high-PR sites like CNN, government/education websites, etc, then it would take many more low-quality links to out rank them; and vice versa... if they have 1,000 garbage links you can usually out rank them w/ a relative hand-full of hand-written high PR .gov/.edu blog/CMS comments.

Anyway, hope that helps. I'm sure others will chime in with much more.

Ps. Tools I use are SEO Spyglass for backlink analysis and Market Samurai for SERPs competition analysis.

Pss. If you really want to know what level of keyword competition you're up against do this in google:

it is about the quality of the links not just the quantity of links the higher the pr the better

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I recently started using Advanced Link Manager to get a complete profile of other sites backlinks. It shows you much more that Yahoo Site Explorer. You will get the anchor text and PR of the page where the link resides. If the sites outranking you have 500 links you can use this tool to see where the most powerful ones come from to match their footprint. They have a 30 day free trial and the software is awesome :-)

Hello Every one, I want to consult with any expert regarding my SEO project. I have tried many techniques but keywords and not coming up. Could any suggest some that can help me out?

I would think that the links to the domain must carry some weight, as well. I always see authority sites such as eHow or about.com with next to zero backlinks on a given page and still rank for the top half of the first page against pages with hundreds of backlinks. But I'm just a noob so what do I know.

Thought I'd ask a quick question while I'm at it: How difficult (or easy) would it be to beat other pages on the top 10 such as Yahoo answers or Youtube videos?

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Quality is better then quantity, add backlinks to the page that your trying to rank for and which ever is most optimized for the search engines.

A specific no. of backlinks cannot assure you ranking because there are many factors involved in it. Domain history, On page content, Backlinks relevancy are some factors involved in natural rankings.

If you want to get ranked then go for xx no. of quality backlinks instead of xxxxx no. of backlinks with low value.

Thanks

I think search engine update it's rules & regulations every time as per latest update of Google your web site doesn't have keyword stuffing or duplicate/copied content. After panda update so many popular websites decreased it's traffic and ranking. So I'll suggest you for give first priority to original/fresh content. Do not stuff keywords and gather links from related niche on natural way. I am sure you'll got good backlinks from search engines. have a nice time.

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The main thing is number of backlinks for the page, but the number of links to the entire site can be a factor. This is sometimes why you see sites ranking well with only a few backlinks, because their entire domain may have millions of backlinks if they are an authority site like Wikipedia.

In general though, you can still outrank these sites I feel, if you focus on creating a 'better' page than their page that you are trying to outrank.
Build more backlinks than them, get better quality backlinks (high PR) links, and then make sure your page is well optimized with your keywords in the headings, description, title and url.