How Many Backlinks Do You Need?

Congratulations! You have built the perfect website, and now it is time to begin a link building campaign to get the word out. Whether you are an experienced Internet marketer or are just starting out, the question invariably becomes “how many backlinks are needed?”

This will vary from situation to situation, as the answer will likely depending on the ultimate goal. Search engines view back links as how popular a website is as regards to the relevancy of a specific set of keywords.

Each specific phrase that information seekers type into a search engine query box will return a list of results related to that term. When you have links at a number of different sites on the World Wide Web, search engines will see the relevancy of your website to the search phrase.

The main objective of most marketers is to have enough backlinks to land on the first page of Google for the targeted keyword. The necessary amount is dependent on several factors; the most important of which is how many other sites are also trying to get ranked for the keyword. This can be easily found out go typing the phrase into the search engine window, enclosing the entire set of words with quotes. This will show exactly how many websites are coming up for the targeted keyword. You will want to compare the first 10 sites that come up (or the entire first page of results) in order to find out what the competition looks like.

In the Yahoo search window, a quick search can be done for each of these sites by typing “http://www.siteurl.com” (without the quotes), replacing siteurl.com with your own URL. This will show how many backlinks each of the top 10 sites has. This can also be done automatically with a plug-in for the Mozilla Firefox browser called SEO Quake that will perform this service more easily.

The perfect plan is to get more than the sites in the top ten, but backlinks are not the only factor that is considered by the search engines when trying to evaluate the rankings for a specific keyword phrase. Such things as the age of the website are important, along with how well the site is optimized for the search engine spiders.

Since there are no concrete rules when it comes to building links, a good idea is to keep on obtaining them on a continuous basis. They will add up quickly over time. It may take a couple of months to see progress, but this can produce a long lasting effect and guarantee you top position in the search engine rankings.