Ranking #1 - Me vs. 188.938 Competitors

I want to rank #1 on a keyword which has 188.000 websites listed in google and i want to achieve this goal with whitehat techniques. The pages on ranks 1 - 5 have about 300 to 400 backlinks (according to backlinkwatch) each. Most of them are on TLDs itself (mostly bought links i guess) Is it possible to outrank them with free links (from blogs, forums and guestbooks)? How many links do i have to get from those free resources to outrank 250 quality backlinks from tlds? Well... Do you think this is possible for a rookie?

Yes I think its very possible. Just takes a little self determination and time. I think you could easily do it with 500 backlinks using free stuff.

I've had some pretty good results targeting bigger niches and have gotten less backlinks and still outranked them. And I still consider myself a total newbie.

300 to 400 backlinks from different IPs? this is gonna be tough. Possible but tough.

For me what always helps is good foundation of keyword specific domain and the right title tags.

You can rank for any keyword you want if you want it bad enough!

It all depends on how much time you want to spend on it. If the keyword is very competitive, it might take six months or a year to get to number one. If the keyword is not that competitive, it might not take as long.

If you use a proxy service like hidemyass or iprental, you might be able to rank faster because you will be linking from different IPs. Backlinks from different IP addresses seem to work better than if you get all of your backlinks from the same IP address.

Use a SEO plugin like SEO for Firefox and SEOQuake to see all of the competitors info. Your real competitors are on page one. I wouldn't get too caught up on other websites outside page 1.

Thanks for your replies!

Do i have to get way more backlinks than my competitors have if i use free links and they got paid links from the first pages of tlds?

I will loot out for the SEO plugins. At the moment im only using linkwatch.

Why are you talking about different ips? Do you think google "knows" from which ip i post on blogs and forums?

U should not worry about the numbers. See the 300 backlinks have what pr using the above suggested add ons, then u will know how many quality links are there, pr1 and above.
Then for high pr see how many obl they have,(using same add ons), if u get ms u can even check if they are anchor texted high pr or not, it may turn out to be only a few like 30-100, check what ever u can and come back, I think if u can get high pr anchor texted links, u can outrank them, one more thing not all links will be do follow.

it doesnt matter if there are 188,000 competing pages or 700 billion. All that matters is the strength of competition in the top 10 to tell you if you have a realistic shot of owning a keyword. Use a tool like market samurai to analyze the competition.

SuperBlackHat said:

it doesnt matter if there are 188,000 competing pages or 700 billion. All that matters is the strength of competition in the top 10 to tell you if you have a realistic shot of owning a keyword. Use a tool like market samurai to analyze the competition.

Click to expand...

That is the only and real answer to this question. JUST ANALYZE the competition.

im analyzing! lets see how long it takes!

so what did you find?