In this series of articles on Blog Consulting we are talking about the big three components of a successful blog; time, links, and content.  We talked about content in our last article.  In this article we will begin to talk about links.  How much competition there is for your keywords will determine how many links you will need to get for your site to show up on page 1 of Google.  One of the best ways to figure out how many links you will need, is to get an idea of how many links your competition has.  To help us with this we are going to use a handy little tool from Yahoo.com called “linkdomain”.  What you need to do is do a Google search for your keywords and see what sites show up in the top five spots.  For example, let’s do a Google search for “blog consulting”:

Now, take the URL’s for the sites that show up and go to Yahoo.com.  Once you get to the search engine on Yahoo type in the following: linkdomain:and the URL address.  Here is what it will look like for the top result for blog consulting.

The result for that search looks like this:

And there you have it.  40,322 links is what you would need to compete with the position one return for blog consulting on Google.  Don’t worry, blog consulting is a very competitive keyword, and your keyword choice will probably not be nearly as competitive.  When you are looking for keywords to help your blog, finding out how many links the competition has can be a big factor in determining if the keyword is worth pursuing.  If your competition has 40,00 links, you should probably look for a different keyword.

That being said, how do you develop links?  One of the first things you should do is begin to read and comment on 4 or 5 blogs that are similar to yours.  If you build some online community you may be able to exchange links after a while.  You will also generate some traffic to your site by leaving comments, and the people who come to your site are potential links as well.  It is a good first step.  We will discuss more linking options in future articles.