First of all, what is SEO? It is an acronym for “Search engine optimization”.
SEO is a science, of making your site rank higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Position). There are several factors that influence your rank. First, and very important – internal site’s structure. There are several rules that have to be met – otherwise search engines will consider a site amateur/spammy/useless and index it badly (and in some cases might even completely drop it from their database).
After some of those rules are met – search engines apply another variable to the set’s ranking – backlinks weight and count. Perhaps there are more factors, affecting site’s ranking, but those are a very well-kept secret (for those exactly same reasons – so that SEO people won’t be able to affect site’s “natural” score)
What are backlinks?
If site “A” has link to site “B” – we can say, that site “B” has a backlink from “A”. If “A” is an authority site, it has more weight in search engine final decision about the rank position. The idea behind this mechanism is that if site “A” refers to site “B”, it probably considers it as a source of good information.
Of course, another logical conclusion is, the more backlinks site has – the better it will be ranked. Again, the idea is, that a lot of sites consider site “B” a trustful resource, and link to it. We can already say, that a good webmaster will take care of its site, organize it, make correct “title” tags, internal links structure and so on (internal optimization), and will then try to get more backlinks, so that his site will attract more users (“traffic”) from search engines.
But what if you have a site, and now your goal is to rank higher. Or you are building a site, and what to know, how much effort will it take to be first in ranks, Or if you are a SEO freelancer, and need to decide the price for your job. Well, now you have to study your competition. I have made my mistakes, when initially going into SEO business; I just jumped inside, without thoroughly checking my competitors, and then heavily regretted it. This article gives you tips, on how to avoid those mistakes.
First, you have to see how many backlinks your competitors have. You can use any backlink checker tool to get a list of backlinks for a chosen site. Then you have to see how “big” (or “serious”) your competitors are. The same above site allows you to see how many pages of this site Google has indexed (about 200 is medium site, >1000 is more or less professional, > 10000 – professional site, and most chances – tough).