: SEO and internal links I'm fairly new to SEO and although I've read many articles on the topic I still don't have a clear idea of how to get my client's website get to the first page of

@Yeniel560

You mention number of links on competitors sites, which may be a fair concern, but have you checked that number on links? Of course, not one by one, but how are those links set, most probably, they have a very intricate system or internal linking, which, well done, may increase findability of pages/products. It's important to have a strong relationship between elements on the site. Not artificially inflated, but fair.

You also mention that you use some services from MOZ, but, have you checked their last Survey and Correlation Data, there you can see what kind of elements weight more on ranking and positioning on search results.

Another reference you may check, is this article about the famous Google’s 200 Ranking Factors. It may not be the best article about it, but is a good categorized list that you can try to check and compare between your client and the competition sites.

Apart of that, we can't tell you why a site comes first on a SERP, only pointers, and general advice.

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@Sherry384

I don't think total links is a valuable metric. Internal links only effect SEO in that it encourages engagement; time on site, time per page, pages per visit, etc. External links, meaning link from your customers site to other sites is important for it's quality. Inbound backlinks are generally the key when talking about links. Where do they come from, the quality of the site, the quality of the page, the authority the page, etc., are important metrics. The number of backlinks is not enough.

Another consideration I did not see you mention is the competitors site age, host, registrar, the site ownership, speed of the site, if there are any other sites associated with this site through the afore mentioned, the traffic of the competitors site, the level of engagement; time on site, time per page, pages per visit, etc. These are all extremely important metrics and can easily trump most leading link metrics alone. As well, how well is the site utilizing keywords through backlinks, title tags, description meta-tags, header tags, leading content, etc? What impression rate are they getting, the CTR, bounce rate, time spent on site, time spent per page, pages read as a result of search? We have only just touched the surface.

Remember that Google is said to have over 200 metrics for rank. That is RANK! This does not include the results engine providing SERPs as a result of a search query. We know that there are metrics associated with Penguin and Hummingbird that have nothing to do with rank. Links are important and backlinks are important to persue, however, it is not the sole linch-pin to good site performance in the search engines. Backlinks are a factor in a whole slew of metrics that are all important.

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