Backlinks and Google Ranking - Mail Bag Q & A

I received the following question from a ThemeMatic user:

“Hi Rob, I was looking at your backling course videos. Good suff. I have a software called market samurai that lists backlinks etc. I was wondering why google only shows me with 4 backlinks of any pr and they also have me listed as #10 for “home based business” in broad match, then when I use seo for firefox the same search term shows me #28. It seems also with all my rankings on “money” keywords I should be seeing a ton more traffic. I realize this is out of scope of themematic, but any input you could gine me on how to hit front page and get traffic would be appreciated.

…
Sidenote, am ranking fast on a lot of the phrases since implementing themematic siloing.

Thanks
Dean”

Here’s my reply:

Hi,
I’m not sure I understand your question, but here goes:
- Google doesn’t show all the links to your site it knows about - it keeps most of them secret and only shows a small sampling of links to prevent anyone from reverse-engineering their ranking algorithm.  A better tool to use is:
http://www.smartpagerank.com/pagerank-backlinks.php

You can also check backlinks in Yahoo by searching for:  link:http://www.mydomain.com  (with Yahoo, you have to have the http:// part)

- Since I don’t know what your site URL is, I cannot investigate what you are optimized for and why you aren’t ranking for what you are targeting.  However, just because a keyword is a ‘money’ keyword, doesn’t mean it is a keyword that gets lots of traffic.

I have ‘money’ keywords with over 50 million competing pages that show tons of traffic for the ‘theme cluster’ and I am ranked #1 in Google for this one-word keyword and STILL only see less than 100 visitors per day from that keyword.  Let me repeat that:  I am #1 in Google with an AUTHORITY listing (all of my Silos appear below my main site link as I’m sure you’ve seen some sites that achieve this much-coveted ‘authority’ listing) for a one-word (short-tail) keyword that has over 50 million competing pages, and STILL see less than 100 visitors per day for this keyword.

So, I wouldn’t put much stock in thinking high rankings for money keywords equals tons of traffic.  Long-tails collectively will get you more traffic than short-tails, which is why having a lot of different content with lots of keywords is a good strategy.

As for how to get traffic:

Search Engines account for only 5-10% of the available traffic.  While ThemeMatic and ThemeZoom is about getting Organic Rankings for Money Keywords, this should NOT be the only strategy you pursue for driving traffic to a web site.

I cannot possibly get into all the other ways to do it.  I guess when I get around to releasing a course that covers everything you may be interested in that.  Until then, I hope this helps.

I would like to use your question and my answer in a blog post for others to benefit from - let me know if that’s OK with you.

-Rob