A while back I wrote about the options you had for building your business. You could either build many small niche sites or focus on just one or two large areas with plenty of potential.

If you choose the latter method (which I am all for if you are willing to go after it and stay in for the long haul), I’d like to make a few points here that may put the task in better perspective for you.

Success in big areas (which have lots of competition) usually requires plenty of content AND requires a focused backlinking strategy for either building quality backlinks or building large numbers of backlinks (and probably both).

For example, I searched “dog training” in Google (a very large and lucrative area for those sites ranking on the first page).

On the first page of those search results I picked out a site for this example (thedogtrainingsecret.com).

First I searched with an operator to find out how many pages the site has. With this search, site:www.thedogtrainingsecret.com, I see they have 786 pages on their site. That’s not a lot really compared to the numbers I’ve seen for other sites in large areas. Many have thousands and even tens of thousands of pages. But still, 786 is still a lot of pages.

Google likes to see plenty of great content on a domain. It’s not the whole picture for how the site ranks, but it does play a part. Of course the more pages a site has, the more long tail searchs they have the opportunity to rank for (and thus more traffic comes there way).

Next I simply typed their full http:// address into Google. There were over 3 million results! I use this type of search as a relative means of gauging the site’s reach with respect to backlinking. Sure, there are backlink tools available, but they are notoriously inaccurate. Of course this type of search does not come close to telling me their true numbers of backlinks. But it is an interesting search which shows just how “busy” the site owners have been in getting exposure for the site.

By the way, the 3 million number may sound scary to you. You probably can’t fathom how you could possibly get near those types of numbers. But really, once you get into the process and learn about the legitimate tools we use to build links with, you will see it’s doable over time.

I use my own sites as a measure of gauging just how much other sites have worked at marketing their site. For example, I’ve done far more backlinking to my CactusCanyon site than my WeberInternetMarketing site. CactusCanyon shows about 500,000 results and WeberInternerMarketing shows only about 70,000. Since they are my sites, those relative numbers give a pretty good indication of how much more time I spend marketing CactusCanyon. Therefore, when I see a site with 3 million results, I can really appreciate just how hard they have worked at marketing the site.

Are you thinking about tackling a large area? Search that area and run those searches I described on several of the sites which rank on the first page for the area’s main keywords. Of course, don’t pay attention to sites like Wikipedia, etc. Just look at those basic sites which are probably owned by individuals like you.

Do not be discouraged if you see giant numbers for some of the competing sites you check. Remember they did not build those numbers overnight. All you have to do is build a great, optimized site, get better quality and quantity of backlinks and YOU will be on that first page of search results!

That’s what is so great about Internet marketing; you are on equal footing with other individual site owners. Simply make your site more relevant in Google’s eyes and you’ll see your site on the first page!