As you probably know, backlinking is an extremely important part of SEO (we call it off-page SEO). Backlinks play a huge role in how Google ranks sites. If you are one of my coaching students, you are aware of the amount of time I spend teaching the concept and the importance of backlinking.

In case you don’t know, a backlink is a link to your site from another domain. For example, if you submit and article to EzineArticles, your bio for the article can contain a link back to your site; that is a backlink.

If you aren’t one of my students, you may be at a loss as to why your site won’t rank on the first page. In many cases your site may in fact be BETTER than most of the sites that do rank on the first page for your keyword. How can that be?

Backlinks matter. It is the quantity and/or quality of sites which link back to yours that makes all the difference in how pages rank in Google.

Unfortunately, there are no backlink tools that are anywhere close to accurate. Even Google Webmaster Tools does not provide good results for how many backlinks sites have. And always take the free backlink tools’ results with a grain of salt…they are NOT accurate at all.

Here is a method that shows the differences between how Google sees your site vs. those sites that rank on the first page for your keyword.

With this technique you can see how much exposure and marketing your competitors have already done compared to you:

Search the keyword your home page is optimized for and find the top ranking site in Google for that keyword. Find a private owned site that ranks high for the keyword (don’t look at things like Youtube, Wikipedia, etc.)

For example, I searched for “mountain bikes” in Google and www.konaworld.com was the #1 result. I then searched for “http://www.konaworld.com” in Google and found 260,000 results. In other words, their URL showed up in Google over a quarter million times in some way shape or form.

Again, these 260,000 results are not all backlinks. Also, there are many backlinks that do not show in a search like this. This large number simply shows just how busy the site owners have been and how broad the site’s reach is.

Now, do the same search in Google for your own domain. Put your full URL in quotes in Google and search. How do the number of results for your URL compare to those who rank high in Google for your keyword? Oftentimes, those sites on page one will have tens of thousands of results while your site may only have a few hundred at most. THIS is one indication for why the other sites rank high compared to yours.

Of course simply having your site referenced more on the web is not the only factor for ranking well, but it is connected and important. This example simply shows how busy some owners are in marketing their website.

After checking your site and comparing it to the first page competitors, you may feel quite frustrated. You may wonder how you could ever compete with those high of numbers.