How many backlinks do you need

Ya. Answer this one, smarty. How many backlinks do you need?

Need for what, says I? Need to get to the top in Google serps, says him.

How far is up, says I.

It really is crazy asking a question like that. It should be obvious that the category, niche, or topic, of the site will determine how much of what is needed to rank highly.

This assumes that you have done the text-book SEO work. That your onpage stuff is good.

It may not take but one link to get you to the top. For instance, I recently read a post where the person bought a text link on the index page of a PR8. The next update had the brand new site (that was linked to) as a PR6. I’m impressed.

From that we can safely assume that the quality of the link would have more weight than the quantity of links. The context where the link was placed, the actual wording of the anchor text, the theme of the PR8, and the theme of the new site. All of those factors will have an effect on the page rank bestowed by the mighty Google.

What about all those long-tail keywords? Now there is the money. Most of the three (and larger) word phrases rank because of the on page text. You can take advantage of this by purposely targeting your long-tail pages.

Just one cruddy trackback that uses the long-tail page name as it’s anchor text will do wonders. Not only will the SE find the text on your page, but it will also be in the title, description, and possibly H1 or H2 tags. At least it should be in those places.

That one cruddy link could make you a lot of money. What if you multiplied that by all of those long-tail phrases that you spent so long generating? Gold.

Something to keep in mind. Your linking strategy should never be focused on PR. PR can be faked it too many ways. And, besides that, it’s phony to begin with.

So here is the real deal. Secret Sauce alert! You need exactly one link more than the competition. That link must have weight.

~d