How many links does it take to rank in position one in google? That all depends on how competitive your niche or to be even more precise your keyword is. Competition dictates how many links you will need to achieve a top ranking in the search engine results pages or serps. This whole topic can get really interesting once you delve into what constitutes a quality link versus a lousy link. One thing is for sure and that is a link is a link as they say. A link is never worth nothing even if it is a no follow link.
So let's suppose that you find a nice keyword that has potential for a high payout whether it be from adsense or affiliate sales. You immediately go to google and enter in the keyword and analyze the results. The top ranking site is a page rank 5 and has two thousand links. Should you enter into this niche and compete with that monster page? You would have to look a little deeper than that before you make that kind of decision.
Upon further inspection you realize that although this page has a couple thousand links and is a page rank 5, the links are not anchored correctly. In other words the anchored links that score this page a pr5 aren't really targeting your particular keyword. This big bad pr5 page may in fact have no anchored links at all targeting your keyword. If that is the case then by all means go after that keyword and take out that top site!
In my experience just a few anchored links from page rank zero sites will do the trick! So it's really difficult to say just how many links you need to rank number one even if you know how many links the top ranking site has. It comes down to quality and targeted anchored links equal quality links. If you are struggling with the learning curve that comes along with learning this business of internet marketing, then this is good news for you. If you are one of those people that just haven't figured out how to make money online with your blog or ebay store or whatever, then learn this once and for all: it's all about anchored links!
As of right now in 2008, it's all about anchored links. I want to make that clear because there seems to be too much information out there. Information overload is killing off would be successful internet marketers left and right. It doesn't need to be that way if you just understand that it's all about anchored links. That's why it's important to be able to look at the anchored links that your competition has before you embark on a niche or keyword. It's worth your time to research tons of keywords and analyze the competition. It may take you two days to find a winner but those two days will save you months of work later on.
I remember when I first learned this and I thought to myself, "Now what am I going to do with my current sites?" I had spent so much time on them and didn't want to admit that they were rather off course. But they were off course and I had to start new ones. That was a big deal to me then because I didn't understand that you could build a blog and get all the links you need in one day. Then the next day you build another site or two and get all the links you need for them and move on.
The trick really is finding good niches and that comes by way of lots of research.
