by Jane Linn

Created on: May 25, 2010

Knowing what the search engines are reporting is the key to achieve your SEO goals.  Of course, the total backlinks are one of the largest determining factors in being ranked for certain keywords and keyword phrases. Many people are in a constant hunt of valuable backlinks.

SEO is a skill, of making your location rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Position). There are some factors, that control your rank. First, and most critical is your website structure. There are a numerous requirements, that have to be met - otherwise Google, Yahoo, and MSN will not give you a page rank. After the requirements are met - these engines use another method – backlinks!

The first thing to know is how good any software is, nothing out there will be 100% accurate. Often, register submissions and bookmarking sites will not show up in any backlink analysis tool, rest assured that most search engines will find them. The same can be said for certain profile and blog entries you have pointed to your site. Most checkers will not discover them at all, or even close, but the search engines are sensitive and are capable to find your links.

It is important to add that there are those out there who purchase all types of software to increase backlinks. However, many can hurt your Google rankings. For instance, if you add 1,000 backlinks at a one time to a forum, the Google can penalize your for it. Make sure that you are very careful with submitting your backlinks. While there are numerous tools that perform an excellent job, it is important the links are submitted carefully.

The more backlinks website has - the better it will be ranked. Again, the idea is, that a lot of sites respect a trustful source, and link to it. We can say, that a good webmaster will take the time to locate, arrange, create "heading" tags, domestic links structure and so on (inside optimization), and will then try to get more backlinks, so that his position will increase user traffic from search engines.

Nevertheless, what if you have a site, and now your goal is too increase rank? How much effort will it take to be first in the Search ranks? Possibly, you are a SEO freelancer, and want to determine the cost for your job? Well, now you have to study your competition. It is important to thoroughly check the competitors. This gives you tips, on how to avert future mistakes.

First, you have to see how many backlinks your competitors have. You can use a Backlink Checker to get the number of backlinks for a website. Then you have to see how "big" (or "deep") your competitors are. The same above allows you to see how many pages on the site Google has indexed (about 200 is middle position, >1000 is more or fewer professional, > 10000 – highly professional site, and most odds - difficult).

"PR" of a site - a score of 0..10, is estimated by Google. It is no longer as important as it once was, but still, gives pretty good evaluation of the site's importance on the web. After this evaluation, you will have much better insight what you need to focus. You now grasp how much effort and money your goals require, and you can make your decision based on this.

Remember, backlinks are the backbone of the current SEO world. It might change in the near future, but it is a fact today.

Backlink Checker

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