SEO: Link Building Part 1

by themisfit on 02/20/2009

Last week we I showed you what Keywords were and how to use them in the meta tags and main content of your site. Optimizing the keywords for your site is only half the battle of climbing the rankings in Google.

This we we are going to talk about how to get your site to become the first search result.

WARNING: THIS WILL NOT HAPPEN OVER NIGHT. IT WILL TAKE TIME AND EFFORT.

There is only one way to make it to the top of the Google standings and that is by making them think you are the coolest kid on the playground. Ultimately ranking in Google, or any other search engine, boils down to a popularity contest. That’s right you have to make it look like you’ve got more friends than the other guy.

So, how do you gain coolness? Coolness is calculated by incoming links to your site.

Coolness Factor

Coolness is based on the number of friends (links) you have. A single link from a uber cool site, might just make all the difference and propel you to the front of the pack.  On the other hand it may take thousands of links to make it to the top. 

The more uber cool links you have the easier it is to move to number one. But if you are getting links from the ‘not so cool’ crowd it will take you much longer.

So to make it to the top you will have to learn how to tell the cool kids from the not so cool kids. The cool kids are #1-10 on the search results for your keyword, the not so cool kids are #11-50. You need  to make Google think that you’re in their circle of friends. 

How Many Links Do I Need?

There is no easy answer to this question, it all comes down to the keyword you are searching for. For a keyword that is not competitive it might take 2 links to be number one, but for an uber competitive keyword it could take you 100,000 or more links.

If you would like to figure this out for a specific keyword this is how I do it:

  1. Search for your keyword in Google and record the addresses of the first 4 results.
  2. Go to Yahoo.com and preform a link domain search (search for linkdomain:eachurlhere.com). 
  3. Note the total number of inlinks shown. This is the number you will have to beat.
  4. Check the page rank of each of those links. Keep track of how many links come from each page rank. (links with higher page ranks are cooler) 

This is not a hard process, but depending on the the number of inlinks to each of your competitors, it could take quite a long time. If you are looking for an automated approach you can head over to SEO Elite  ($167 US) and it will automate this process for you. The other alternative is to contact me and I can do the work for you as well. I won’t cost as much as SEO Elite.

So this is a start to understanding link building, next week we’ll talk about getting sites to link to your site.

There are 7 comments in this article:

  1. 02/21/2009Cuántos enlaces necesito para aparecer en los primeros resultados de Google - Chica Seo says:

    [...] Fuente: SEO: Link Building Part 1 [...]

  2. 03/1/2009SEO: Link Building Part 2 | Irrelevant Ramblings says:

    [...] SEO: Link Buildng Part 1 [...]

  3. 03/5/2009Eli S. says:

    I really like your popularity contest comparison for the process of link building, since it’s really quite accurate. The only thing I’d like to add, is that getting really popular sites to link to you should be the primary goal on your linking agenda. The other sorts of links are so much easier to get anyway, that the focus should always be on quality over quantity.

  4. 03/5/2009admin says:

    @Eli, I totally agree with you.:

  5. 05/20/2010Liam Price says:

    Link popularity is very important if you want your website to rank high in any search engine.,,`

  6. 05/23/2010Ryan says:

    Not only are the links important, but also the anchor text. You can try our search engine optimization software for free where we have an extensive link analyzer. You can enter a competitor’s website and we will go and grab their inbound links (excluding internal) and score each one from 0 to 100 and show you the anchor text. The score is based on how many links the referring page has, the PageRank, popularity, trust, anchor text and location of anchor text. This saves an SEO a ton of time since it would take you about 10-15 minutes to evaluate each competitor link like this. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

  7. 07/25/2010Brianna Lee says:

    as everyone knows, link popularity is very important in gaining page rank.-*;