Hi, new to the site as I've been searching for a good SEO forum to be able to converse with others about these subjects, haven't been satisfied with what I've found, and found out that digitalpoint comes highly recommended. This topic might be more of a challenge, I'm not sure, but usually I see a lot of threads with people asking "what do I do for SEO" and people respond back "blog comments, forums, social networking, etc. etc. etc.". Which is great, but say, for example, you needed to place in the top 10 for a keyword that gets about 250,000 local views a month. Of course, in trying to optimize for something like that, it's the same tools you're using for optimizing anything, but more specifically, what kind of effort would it take? There might be hard competition for the keyword, or maybe the competition isn't so strong, and of course one would need to rise in rankings in a natural-looking way, so as to not be penalized by Google... but how hard would it be to achieve? I'm given to understand that it'd take about a year for it to happen in the right way, but I don't have any clue as to how much work goes into it. How many backlinks are we talking about each month, and how can one find out if they're quality or not? Any input on this is greatly appreciated (and if it wasn't clear enough, yes, I'm pretty new to this and am tasked with the goal of taking on such a trafficked keyword ).
250,000 local searches typically isn't that hard if you have a little prior experience, but it will definitely come down to your competition. Type your keyowrd in Google and then look at the top 3-5 sites that appear on the first page - you will need to copy each of the URLs and paste them into Yahoo site explorer (just Google "yahoo site explorer"). This will show you the amount of backlinks each of your top competitors have. My guess is that they won't have over 2 or 3 hundred backlinks. If they do, it will probably take months and months and months of work and content production. Anything under 100 backlinks, I'd say pumping the usual marketing methods for about 2-3 months consistently will get you the ranking you're looking for. I would say don't just stay in love with one keyword or phrase. Branch out with your main keyword to find longer tailed keyword phrases. Your goal should be a keyword with a decent amount of local searches that ALSO HAS MINIMUM COMPETITION. This combination is very important - not just one over the other.
Well actually it would depend upon what niche you are talking about some might not be that tough to achieve a top 10 ranking whereas some might be. As an example for a webhosting company ranking high for any keyword that generates a decent amount of traffic would be very competitive to achieve as it has a very tough competition. So it completely depends upon the industry you are into. Also the time required to rank is also based on this. It might take more time to rank high for a more competitive keyword. As far the number of links is concerned that is also dependent on the type of competition and the quality of links. You may rank higher than your competition with only 50 links given that he has 100 links its all about quantity. But you need to be patient and need to keep on working on building quality links and you will get the desired results. Hope that helps!
Hey guys, thanks for the replies. Well, the first one has 375 inbound links that aren't from within the domain. The second one has about 100, and third place has 1,324. lol Tracking down what was happening with #3 was really interesting. They are listed as a psychologist on about four different sites, each site has a blog, and there's a link back to their individual website on just about every single page on all of the other websites and on every article on all of the blogs. The thing that's interesting about #2 is that they barely had any links, some of them were from a blog, but the rest where from directories and also apparently some kind of link exchange with other local businesses (they had a little button on the bottom of the page along with other businesses and each of them had all the buttons on their page). What's weird though is that it's not showing any backlinks for my site and there have been a few established for a couple of weeks now. I'm wondering if I have what it takes to take this on, or if we should hire someone. There's a local SEO that would charge 4000 euro for the first year, for top 10 on this word, and 700 euros each year for maintenance. What to do what to do.... Ahh, we have a blog but it's on our domain. I notice that wordpress has a page on it's website that lists all the blogs that have entries for a certain tag. Will those kind of links add up well? We put the blog on the domain so that the website would benefit from the blog's traffic when it comes to SEO. Would it also be a good idea to have a blog from elsewhere that could link back to the website with every post, like the #3 website mentioned above? If we syndicated the material from the blog on our domain to that one, would it cause us to be penalized by google? Thanks in advance for any input.
I searched Yahoo and it just doesn't show all the websites that Google does that have a link to us... is Yahoo that slow in crawling the web?
But what's confusing is that Google's Webmaster Tools doesn't show any data for "links to your site" either. I thought it would have started showing something by now, especially since it's started showing various searches that are producing pages of ours to be listed. When I search google for our website address, it produces all sorts of results that have links to us. How long does it take for that info to update in Webmaster Tools? I'm kinda impatient 'cause I don't know if the effort I've started putting into it translates to anything/is something I should stick with.