How many links do I need?

[Harry D]

How to find out, how many links do you need to become #1? :о
Or at least to get in top10 in Google for some specific keywords?

[dcz]

There is no absolute rule here as everything as to be viewed as relative.

All words are not keywords, and all keywords are very different.

For example if you'd decide to go for a site targeting like, let's say "new york real estate", even though there are a lot of keyword and the site is "only" related to one state, it will be very hard to show up in good position with the search query : new york real estate Only 168 000 000 matching results if you see what I mean.

So to start an Internet real estate business in NYC, you'd better have backlinks, like more than a lot, but not only.

As you can see, the second "natural" result (not AdWords) is the new york time : http://www.nytimes.com/pages/realestate/ (PR 9 Only for this deep page). And this particular page Only has 114 000 Backlinks.

The first result is only PR 6 with 44 Backlink. Yahoo gives 2081 results though.

So this is actually a good example to give clues.

Here it seems Google gave a little plus to the first one compared to the second one because it seemed more related to the search query to it's algorithm.
And I find the result quite good, a specialized real estate web site with it seem some efforts in content with not that many backlinks, but they must be very well related, a good PageRank, but not outrageous, showing up before a PR 9, but being part of a web site covering a lot more general topic.

This shows us there are a lot of parameters, and how much contents counts as search engine are becoming more and more precise.

But while the new york time's PR 9 page stay second when we search only for real estate, (over 600 000 000 results) the other one is not here any more.

Actually, I am pretty sure the new york time's page will stay here for a long time, while the other site still could move more as it's position is more fragile (less backlinks make it easier for competitors).

Now all this is very different for other keywords being less used in the net such as picabouille.
I am using this example I already used once in the french forum as it was already to highlight the same idea. The point back then was to prove "we" where going to be first on this word (easy isn't it to be first out of one ).

Now we see that some challenger would need a very small amount of backlinks to show up, if not first, at least on the first page for this query.

There is really a lot to say about this, but I think you get the idea. It's relativity here, it all depends, one need to evaluate keyword profiles (is it used, what are the search results on this, how many ...) before he can tell how hard it is going to be.

Then, there is something to keep in mind while building or developing a web site, do not over focus on your first targeted keywords. I mean it's very important to focus on them, but you must as well be pragmatic and look at your stats. Because you'll most likely find out keywords or keywords combination you did not think about at first and that could be the one to already provide the more visitors.
And worst, you could show up first for keywords never being searched for .
So you need to think as well to leave some "side doors" opened and to constantly keep an eye on which keywords are actually having good results. That's where new content posted regularly is a very good thing.

++