Ok, so after having studied google results for a while, and tried to figure out how they rank sites, I’ve come to realize how important links are to you. Here’s my theory on how google ranks your site based on links. I think they take your pagerank, whatever it may be and they also figure out your pagerank for the specific search terms that were searched on. To determine this specific pagerank, they take the number of links that have those keywords in them and figure out how close the anchor text of those links are to those search terms, and figure out a pagerank based on that.
The reason I think this is because I’ve studied the results for the search terms ‘utah real estate’ a lot. The pages at the top, have the words utah real estate in their pages, but the amount of times they have those words in them varies greatly. The #1 page only has them 1 time. However, everyone who links to that page links to them with the keywords ‘utah real estate’ in the link text. Another page in the top 10, is just a page of links (actually there are a couple of them). However, they have one page of links for every state, and every state links to every other state with the state name and real estate as the keywords as the link text. the site is http://www.reguideusa.com/Utah_Real_Estate.html. If you look at it, it’s just adsense, reciprocal links, and links between pages. So the Utah_Real_Estate.html page has at least 50 pages that link to it with the anchor text of ‘Utah Real Estate’ and they show up on the first page of google.
This is one of the mistakes I’ve made in my linking strategy for http://www.utahrealestatehelp.com. I’ve tried to get links to my site with the keywords ‘utah real estate’ in them, but also with lots of different words in them (which isn’t a total mistake). The problem is that people search ‘utah real estate’ a lot, and don’t search other similar things very often so when someone searches it and another site has 50 links to it with those exact keywords in the link texts, of course it’s a more relevant site.
Now, don’t get me wrong, having every link to your site being exactly the same probably isn’t a good thing. It makes it look like those links were artificially placed. However, short, concise links that have only your keywords in them are pretty important to have when trying to rank highly.