Hi, I have recently gone to start a new site, this time it is one that I am passionate about and did not actually research about. I would like to ask a few questions first off Is it possible to get in the top 4 of a certain search term, where all the top 4 have pageranks above 5 and alexa's under 300k, yet minimal backlinks and indexed pages? Do I need to get backlinks from sites that are in my genre for them to count towards my ranking? Or doesn't that matter and I can get any old PR 5 or 6 to make it count? That is all at the moment, more questions may be asked in the thread. A little sidenote, this is not my arcade site Thanks
PR and Traffic isn't directly to SERP. So I don't think the first question is relevant to your goal. About the 2nd question Google give more weight to relevant sites linking to you. So focus on adding links related to your niche. And dont' waste your time getting PR from not related sites because it is somehow useless if you're talking about Google SERP because they are not directly related or whatsoever.
Well a lot of the links from the 2nd position are just topsites and link pages, could age also be a factor here? Some of the sites are 6 years old
Yes, age of domain really played a factor on SERP. Google gives more weight on sites/domain registered for long years.
With google, building slow and steady works best. I can take 6 months to a year to earn googles trust for competitive keywords. Alexa does not mean crap since you can install the toolbar and pound your own site all day long. Alexa is useless unless you are a top 10,000 site and even then I would not look too much into it.
I don't know about proving quality, but it is helpful for weeding out the spammers who generally don't register names for more than a year.
Don't consider PR if you want to see how competitive it's gonna be. Think of this for a minute... May be some PR7 page is linking to them. But because this page is also linking to other pages, so less PR is flowing to this number 1 site. You don't know how many important pages might be linking to the site at 1 spot. Check the back links in yahoo. Visit some of them and see their PR. See if you can get a link on that very page which is linking to them. An year ago I came across a site which was PR3 but was listed in DMOZ. Search DMOZ for the URL of the 1 result in google. Do this for other sites also on first page of google for your term. Getting related links will be the most important aspect. 1 or 2 PR6 links as you are thinking will not do it. See how many related links you will be able to get. If all looks fine, GO for it!!! Bye