I see it time and time again. Someone trying to optimize their website for whatever keyword phrase and trying to think of ways to beat Google. They are thinking that they need "x" amount of link exchanges and "x" amount of directory listings or that their keyword density needs to be "this" for Google to give them the all important page 1 rankings in the search engine results.

So how many links do you need to get on to page 1? The answer is it depends. The first thing to keep in mind when starting your search engine optimization campaign is that you are not competing against Google or its algorithm to improve your rankings. Your are competing against your competition. So who is your competition? Well if your keyword phrase is "gift baskets" then all the sites that appear in the search results for that term are your competition.

Now that you know who your competition is you can begin to challenge them for rankings. You do not need to reinvent the wheel, just find out what your competing sites have done to get their sites ranked. To do this you will need to do some analysis.

First visit their websites and take a look at their pages. Are they using the keyword phrases in the content? If they are then you will also need to create content pages based on your desired keyword phrase. Just keep in mind that this content should be written with the intend that people will be reading it so it should make sense and not just be a page peppered with a keyword phrase.

Next find out who is linking to your competition and how many links are pointing to those sites. For this you can use Yahoo's Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/). While it will not show you 100% of a sites incoming links it will show most of them. If your competing sites have only a few incoming links than your site has a good chance of ranking fairly quickly with some good quality links.

You will also want to look at the quality of links pointed to your competition's sites. For example if you see lots of off topic sites such as casinos pointed to a site then you job will be that much easier. Links from sites such as the Yahoo directory would be considered a high quality authoritative link and so you will need to pay attention the quality of links you will need for your site.

Keeping your eyes on your competition and not worrying about "beating the search engines" will help you keep your optimization efforts more focused and get you better results, and of course rankings.