How long do you guys think it would take (and how much work) to get ranked (not tranked) in the top 1-3 for a keyword with 138,000 results in quotes and 252,000 without quotes? What kind of work would need to be done, and what's the easiest way to climb the SERPS ladder from the bottom? I assume backlinks would be the answer, so what's the best way to get backlinks? Should I go for article submission or find a bunch of sharing sites with PR4+ and try to get links from them? I'm sure all of these questions have been answered before but the search function for some reason doesn't work so I'll just ask them.
Should be relatively easy. The way to get there is the same as always... The fastest way would probably be to buy a domain name that exactly matches the targeted keyword phrase you want to rank for if you're willing to start a new site and build it out w/ 10 or 20 pages of content. Otherwise, create a page on a site that you already own that hopefully is relevant to the targeted keyword phrase. Next optimize the on-page ranking factors like <title>, <h1>, <h2>, content of page, etc. for the targeted keyword phrase. Then build backlinks from other relevant pages on your site as well as other sites to the page you want to rank for that keyword phrase. It's great if the pages linking to the URL you want to rank also has the keyword phrase (or slight variation) in their <title>, <h1>, <h2>s, and/or content. Use the exact keyword phrase you want to rank for as the link text in those backlinks most of the time (say 40-60% of the time)... Then use as many slight variations of the targeted keyword phrase as you can think of (preferably 10 or more) as the link text the remainder of the time. It should not take that many inbound links at all to climb to page 1. Depending on how optimized the top 3 sites are and the number and types of backlinks they have, you may or may not have an easy time unseating them from positions 1-3... but getting on page 1 should be a breeze.
@ Canonical If I can't get the domain for the keyword exactly, what would be the next best thing? The keyword is 3 words long. It looks like I could get www.keyword.us or www.keyword.biz, but these are also available: www.12-3.net www.1-23.net www.1-2-3.org www.12(synonym for 3).com Also, using a backlink checker, looks like the site in the #3 position has around 300 backlinks from about 100 domains, most of these being PR 0. The highest PR link (PR4) does not have the keyword as the anchor text.
This is really hard to determine how long it would take. As a rough guess I would say several months provided you do proper on-page SEO and get lot of backlinks.
the keyword you are using is not competitive so you will not having a hard time to get the highest rank.
Should be quite easy depending on your competition. Get some good backlinks and do some on-page SEO and you should be golden.
You can get backlinks via directory submission, blog submission, blog commenting(niche related blog), forum posting and social bookmarking..