The question of 'How Many Links are Enough?' In the context of 'How Many Links are Enough to give me top ranking in Google?' is a question I get asked very often. My knee-jerk reaction is to shoot back with 'how long is a piece of string?' But the question has got me thinking.

After all, I'm partly in the business of SEO, whilst also being in the business of running my own site. This led me to doing a few experiments, as part of the Celtnet WebInfo eZine I run to impart information to other webmasters.

The glib answer to the question of 'How Many Links is Enough?' is: 'As many as you need'. Which, actually, is pretty realistic. It depends on a whole host of factors... Most important amongst them being how much competition you're facing for the keywords you're targeting and where the links you're getting are coming from.

A single good link from a high PR site or an education or government site can be worth as much as 20 or more links from low-ranked sites. The only way to get some kind of answer was to do my own testing on this. So I chose two sections of my own site, one of which had only been up for about a month and another which didn't even exist yet. The first of these was targeting the 'ClickBank Ads' keyword which, as you can imagine, is very competitive. The second targeted the 'Wild Food Recipes' niche which is not very competitive at all. I began my campaigns in the last week of January and saw how I'd done in the second week of March (a six-week window).

When I checked I was #1 in Google for both terms. The 'ClickBank Ads' page had 647 in-bound links and the 'Wild Foods' had 11 in-bound links. Now that's quite a difference! So, how did I get these results? Well, a lot of hard work. I began by preparing the ground for the 'ClickBank Ads' campaign and sent out a press release and then another. With 4 articles under may belt that propelled me to the first page of Google.

I find that press releases are great for creating an instant 'buzz' but after a while that buzz dies down and you slip back into the third or fourth page. So now began the proper campaign. I added the 'ClickBank Ads' page to my USFreeAds account, writing a free ad about it and including my URL. I also added articles to my favourite article directories: EzineArticles, GoArticles and Celtnet Articles. In addition I added Blog comments and Forum posts and comments to various forums and blogs that would be interested in using this software.

This really was a lot of effort and netted almost 650 in-bound links in 6 weeks, which is good going. Whether I will maintain that effort (and whether I actually want to) is another issue.

The 'Wild Foods' campaign goes completely to the other side of the equation. It took me a while to build the site and to get enough content to be able to release it in a worthwhile manner. But the release data came and I added articles to my favourite articles site again as well as a couple of blog comments (people looking for recipes) and that was it. In all I gained 11 links, but one of those was from the Telegraph newspaper in the UK who saw one of my recipes and re-published. This link, alone, was worth the others put together. But it does show that even small article directories can be useful as the link was found from the RSS feed published each evening by the Celtnet Articles site. So it's not always the PR or even the size of the article directory that matters but what they can do for you!

So, what does this mean. Well, getting to the front page of Google with just about any keyword is possible it's just a question of how much effort you're willing to put in. The take-home message for me is that being clever in a market with relatively low competition can be better for you that using brute force in a very competitive market.

The 'Wild Food' page links though to recipes and to descriptions of edible plants and both these are now beginning to gain first page spots in Google thanks to the work done on the 'Wild Food' home page itself. Each page doesn't bring-in much traffic by itself (for per day at most) but there are over 200 pages in all so that's a potential 800 additional surfers all for the cost of 11 links! Now those are the kinds of numbers I like to see.

Work smart, not hard... For little effort I now have a very successful addition to my main website. A mini site within the site, if you will.

About the author:
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the celtnet.org.uk/articles site where you can submit free articles. If you are truly seripus about your site's rankings then you must sign-up for the free How to Maximize your Web Traffic eCourse.
Article Source:
seoarticles4u.com