Im going for a phrase that has about 400,000 competition with out quotes and about 17,000 with quotes. What would be the best way to get to number one? Right now I am planning on articles and link wheels but I am not going to close the wheel. After that I am going to start just getting some back links to the articles. Is there anything else I should start doing or does this just about cover it? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
That is too difficult... You should have huge budget to face competition of 400 Million. It may take a lot of time as well.
You have to do your SEO homework and then get busy on what you learned. Did you do your On-Page optimization? Title Tag, keyword tag, description tag, H1 tag and content all need to contain your keyword. Why are you sending the backlinks to your articles? This will just get your articles ranked. You need to send your backlinks to the homepage to get the homepage ranked. You need .edu, .gov, .com, and high PR backlinks to your homepage...ALL with the keyword phrase in the anchor text. You need to bookmark the page at the top social bookmarking sites. Go to the SEO section of this forum and read. You need to analyze what the top-10 sites on Google have done to get their sites there and you need to do more than them, in terms of SEO. I got my site to #1 in Google, Yahoo & Bing by doing this. There were 35.5 Million competing pages in Yahoo for my phrase (not in quotes) and something like 1.9 Million competing pages for the term in quotes. After you do your SEO, then read this forum and learn how to drive traffic to your site. There's tons of great info here on how to do that. Hell, you could skip the SEO and just learn how to drive traffic. Traffic rules!
I think the idea of getting links to articles would be because the links are not so high quality, strictly legit (obviously). So link power goes in bulk to the article, then the article passing it's improved power link to the site. Anyway, the quote above is a good plan on what to do