How many links do you need?

This is a great question, and one that is not as straight forward as you might think. Initially the first port of call when looking to rank for a term is to have a look at the to 5 sites. Copy their url into http://uk.siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/siteexplorer and you will get a good idea of the size of the site and how many backlinks it has.

While this is a guide, it is very rough guess as often those links might be of very low quality, or be coming from the host site itself!

The level of detail analysis depends upon how much you are willing to invest. SEO is a cart before the horse industry, whereby you need to invest long before you see any return on your investment. The more indepth your analytics, the more accurately you can foretell when your site will reach the top.

It is possible to look at each link in turn and establish its worth, the site pr, the page pr, the page title, headings, link text etc and from this data it is possible to establish a strategy to outdo the top sites and rank there yourself.

If you concentrate on getting high quality links to your site then you will succeed, all you have to do is keep on keeping on.