Whether it’s through backlink building or something else, achieving top search engine ranking on the major search engines especially Google must be the greatest desire of every online business owner. Well certainly since everything that you hope to achieve in your business depends very much on it. Web traffic, online profits, marketing strategies, brand marketing, website popularity among others.

What I learned from my recent backlink building success

While I certainly won’t call getting to Google’s page 1 for three keyword phrases over 3 weeks a major milestone in my Internet Marketing journey, I do relish a moment of satisfaction. I guess it’s these little things that keep us going.  But what have I learned? I learned:

• that quality of backlinks is more important than quantity. Getting 10 links from PR6-PR9 is of greater value than getting 100 links from PR1-PR2 sites.
• Google’s page rank does not mean much since I was able to outrank many sites which had higher page rank than my homepage - due to my high quality PR sites’ backlinks
• A common mistake many new marketers make while searching for backlinks of  their  website is to run the query ” link:domain.com” in the Google search engine. This is totally inaccurate. A better option is through the use of the Webmasters Tools section.
• you get the benefit of a site with high page rank even if your link appears on any of its many pages with ZERO page rank.
• it doesn’t bother me even if bad sites link to me, including spammy ones, gambling sites etc. I really cannot control people who choose to link to me but it’s important to know that it won’t hurt me. But it would be a different story to link back to these sites, so I absolutely don’t link to such sites.
• that Angela Edward’s backlink building program really works. Perhaps I’ve been barking at the wrong tree but it helped me achieve in 3 weeks what I could never did in 2 years- at least for these 3 keyword phrases.

how many backlinks do you need to outrank other websites?

• there is no cast-in-stone magic number. It depends on how competitive your niche is. For very competitive ones like Internet Marketing, Weight Loss or Dating Service, you should do about 100-200 high PR backlinks.
• it also depends on where your keyword phrase ranking currently stands. I mentioned in my recent post “Link Building: Taking Backlink Building To a Higher Level“, it took me about 50 good links to move keyword phrase ‘online business opportunities’ 22 positions to #2.
• I would say for niche marketing sites you would need about 50-70 high PR links to see good results.

my most used and reliable tool in backlink building

• A firefox addon‘ which identifies dofollow links by the color purple (red signifies nofollow links)

Keyword Research - Knowing Your Competitors

When you are trying to outrank other websites in your keyword phrases to get top search engine ranking, you should spend some effort sizing up your competitors. Finding out what’s their SERP on the same keyword you’re trying to rank for, how many incoming links, page rank etc are critical information you can use to beat them. There are many tools which can do this job but lately I was pretty impressed with Keyword Spy Tool which helps you spy on your competitors in seconds. Well go take a look and try it out for yourself when you’re doing some keyword research.

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Did you miss any of these?:

• Watch Me Get To Google Top 10 Ranking
• Here’s A Smarter Link Building Strategy To Get Top Search Engine Ranking
• Are You Getting The Google Sandbox?
• How “Work From Home Ideas” Made Google Top 10
• Case Study: How Work At Home Homepage Got High Page Rank PR4