Ideally I know that you should aim for a lot of quality backlinks AND to have those keywords used on your site as often as possible (wihout spamming the site of course) Use 'em in the description, in the content, in the anchor text, the title, etc.

I'm wonder what makes the most impact on your ranking for a competitive keyword. Backlinks, or how your site is 'optimized' for those keywords?

Always optimize on site but truly competitive terms are going to need massive link popularity/trust which, again, can come back down to the quality of your content/linkbait.

Originally Posted by AnnCP

Ideally I know that you should aim for a lot of quality backlinks AND to have those keywords used on your site as often as possible (wihout spamming the site of course) Use 'em in the description, in the content, in the anchor text, the title, etc.

I'm wonder what makes the most impact on your ranking for a competitive keyword. Backlinks, or how your site is 'optimized' for those keywords?

Backlinks are #1

other than keywords have you tried cross domain linking?

Originally Posted by Worldwebuser

Backlinks are #1

well.. only if the words are in the anchor text of the link

I'd say Anchor Text is #1 (and since anchor text is in a link, links are #1 )

Yeah, backlinks is the one on most important factor if it's competitive enough!

When looking to get links you should at least consider these things:

- Vary the anchor text. If you want to rank high for 'sudoku' then you should not have all your backlings with the anchor text 'sudoku' - there should also be a decent amount of the links which anchor text is varied combinations which just include 'sudoku'.

- Check if it is "trusted sites". Check the pagerank of the linking pages and the site. The higher the better BUT you should also use the "site:domain.com" to check if there's many pages indexed on that domain, because if there's few pages compared to how manby pages you'd expect there to be on the website then it could mean that it isn't seen as a very trusted site. The more links from trusted sites the easier it will be for you.

- Get as many links from related sites - not (just) random link exchanges and directories.

Actually is you have random links BUT from trusted resources (like Yahoo, big media sites, majors in the industries) - it's not a problem.

The only problem is to know whether Google takes this or that site as a reputable source or not :devil:

And it's not just backlinks. Your links have to be HIGHLY relevant as the days of free for all link trading our behind us. Meaning that if you're a real estate agency trying to compete within a really competitive market, some experts say that you should only trade links with other real estate agencies. It used to be as a real estate agent you could trade links with mortgage companies, home improvement contractors and others, but now you need to try and keep your links 90% relevant to your topic or more.

Besides, the more relevant they are, the better. 1 highly relevant link is better than 10 kind of relevant links.