How many QUALITY RELATED, inbound links should your website have for it to rank in the top 10 in the SE's?

Question

the search engines these days are relying more and more on quality related inbound links to your website rather than just any old link, which is a good thing....

my question is how many of these quality inbound related links should your website have before it starts to rank in the top 10 in the major search engines for that particular keyword.

Answer 1

There is no right answer as there are a number of factors involved. In some cases, a website can rank for a highly competitive keyword phrase with just a handful of links while another website may take years before it achieves ranking for the same phrase with hundreds or even thousands of links. It depends on links, the age of your domain, trust factor, frequency and percentage of changes, relevancy and so on. There are literally over one hundred different factors involved in ranking, so just focus on building quality links and developing original content, and over time you will get the results you're looking for.

Answer 2

The number of links you need to compete very much depends upon the level of your competition. The numbers vary according to the particular business verticals. You will need to discover the benchmarks for your particular vertical. Find out who your competitors are for the keywords you wish to compete for, then learn what the link share is for each of them. You will most likely find that your main competitors generally fall within a certain range regarding the number of inbound links they have.This is what you will need to aim for. Keep in mind however that link count alone is not the only measure of success. Examine these links to determine where they are coming from - link quality is also important. Back links from pages with high page ranks are worth more than back links from generic directories with no page rank.

So, how do you discover all this information? There are a number of tools available. I recommend dnscoop.com. This site provides information related to domain age, page rank, Alexa traffic rank, as well as link share. It connects to the Yahoo search engine for its source of link information - Yahoo discloses much more information than Google. You can also use Yahoo directly to discover your competitor's links by using the link command in the search box, link:www.domainname.com. Take some time to see where these links are originating from and if they are relevant, see if these same sites will provide a link to you. Examine the page ranks to get an idea of the quality of these links. Download the Google toolbar and enable the page rank function. Also look for links that originate from .edu or .gov sites - these can be very valuable.

Answer 3

Well that depends on the particular keyword. If you are trying to show up in the top 10 results for a highly sought after keyword like 'car', you will need a lot of inbound links. In addition to inbound links, the search engines also look at the meta tags and the overall content of your site. Also, they tend to have a preference for sites whose content changes from time to time (blogs are better placed for this reason). Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Actually I see this question or something like it a lot.

Before I answer lets take a look at the competition.  Petfinder.com has a Page Rank of 8, they have 475,000 indexed pages on their website. According to Google they have 2580 in bound links.  Google always understates links so if you check with Altavista it is more like 897,000. More importantly though is that Petfinder has been around for 10 years, 8 months and 8 days.  

Your site has a Page Rank of zero, 19 total pages, zero links according to Google or 235 total links according to Altavista.

Your site is most likely brand new.  The major Search Engines want to see History before they start passing along good search results for high volume key words.

What does it mean?

By all means keep working on your site. Add pages with valuable content. Build links with good websites. Keep going over your site to work on Optimizing it.  

You cannot focus on one area like links and expect to get where you want to go.  It is like asking how much fuel do I need to get to Mars.

Yes, you need fuel. Fuel is a vital part of what you need to consider to be successful.  But it is only one part and for something as competitive as the search terms you want to rank for, you need to broaden your focus.  

Link building alone is a strategy all to itself.  Did you know that the link building rules have changed in the last six months.  Major Search Engines are all working to discount link credit that comes from paid links, links from outside the target country, links from link farms, links from pages that have nothing but links on them. Did you know that getting links from some places will actually lower your Search Engine Ranking?

Building links too fast is also a way to lower your search results.

If your website is brand new it is going to take some time for the search engines to build their trust of your site.  They want to be able to come by and take a snap shot of what is on your site.  They file that snap shot away and compare it to other snap shots of your site. They do that over a period of time until they are comfortable with what you are doing, and that they can trust you not to try to fool them into falsely ranking for terms that don't apply.  Links are just ONE of the ways that they determine if Other sites trust you.  Search Engines Expect those links to be formed slowly over time as a natural process of getting noticed by other sites.

Check Out the Google webmaster tools.  Get to know what Google is looking for (at least what they will share with you).  Work within those parameters.  

Check out your competition. Analyze the websites that occupy the top ten positions for the keywords you want to rank for.  Find out what you can do to beat them out for those positions.

It will never happen over night but if you keep it up and methodically work at it, eventually you can get there.