Jeffrey Smith asked:


Depending on your link building and development strategy, finding the right link velocity (the rate in which you acquire or lose links) can determine how your pages rank respectively in search engines.

Although the title may sound like a jingle, all cliches aside, building the ideal quantity and type of links each month to maintain a stable search engine ranking is a unique formula for each site (which could be 20 links per page or 40 links per month per term for every competitive top 10 keyword).

Although link building is not the “magic bullet” for creating a high ranking position, it’s contribution to the process is undeniable. Finding the elusive number of links for each of your keywords is crucial for managing hang time in the SERPs (search engine result pages).

Here is a basic SEO technique you can use to quickly determine how competitive a keyword is. For example, if a keyword has 10,000 or less competing pages using the exact match form of the term “in quotes” in Google, then hitting the top 10 for a keyword like this would only require 15-20 quality inbound links & a few pages of great content.

If a keyword returns search results “in exact match” in the 500,000 to 1,000,000 result range, that is considered a competitive keyword.

Competitive keywords may require hundreds of links to impact them with an entire series of pages supporting the sites most relevant page via internal and external links. Each market has it’s own unique ranking criteria, but if you are working with a site that has acquired ranking power, acquiring terms under 50,000 results in Google is like picking the low hanging fruit.

To see how competitive some of your keywords are, try looking at your keywords in “exact match” form, just “type your keywords in the quotes instead” then see how many competing pages are targeting that keyword.

In the beginning building links with the throttle wide open and developing a plethora of links is typical. Then after you hit the top 40-50 results (with that page), then ease back and use finesse to climb the remaining positions into the top 10 search results.

Experimentation is the key, and each site reacts differently to different circumstances (so don’t rely too heavily on any one tactic). The key is finding the best line of SEO defense, which is to add a stream of fresh links as well as focusing on link quality above link quantity (all it takes is one from the right source).

Link velocity (the rate in which you gain or lose links) is an important component in maintaining how your pages will pass vital link juice and nourishment to the rest of your site. If you slack off, you lose your footing, or if you create a spike by building links too fast, you could invoke a penalty (and actually lose rankings).

Using deep links (linking to specific pages using optimal anchor text) has a profound impact on search engine placement. Deep linking capitalizes on the perfect marriage of content and strategic link building and hastens the development of authority for your site. As a result, you require less links (per keyword) over time to maintain and defend your position.

When initiating a link building campaign, aligning the fundamental aspects needed to acquire a high ranking position are rather elementary, what may not be so apparent is the amount of time it takes until all of the off-page and on-page criteria align and you gain access to the top 10.

Getting there is half the fun, but staying there requires a constant vigil as the demands for competitive phrases have a high churn rate (top 10 one day slipping 10 positions the next).

In closing, here is one of many methods for determining the best page to build links to with the highest occurrence of the keyword on that page.

Just use Google and add the following search command:

[keyword] site:domainname[dot]com in a search box & hit return (brackets around the keyword are not required and replace the word dot with a period). Then Google will return the page with the highest relevance for those keywords for the respective domain.

The value in this strategy is, the pages lower on the screen in the top 10 results returned are the ones with the least amount of relevance for that term, so you can either develop addition links to them (to build them up), or use the top 2-3 results to add more weight to those pages.

In either case, you entire site gains additional allinanchor relevance (the number and quality of the keywords in the anchor text/link) which is a major facet to defending your position as well as climbing higher up the rungs of the ladder in search engines.