Backlinks indeed are important, but they are totally not required to successfully pull up in the serps. In the game of search engine marketing by targeting certain keywords or phrases, there are really two ways of going about it.

The first way, which I tend to place much more focus on is longtail keyword targeting. David Cooley does this too. Longtail keyword targeting can be broken down into two strategies in itself. Sheer mass volume longtail keyword targeting and low volume longtail keyword targeting via analysis and predictability. Longtail keyword targeting doesn’t depend on backlinks.

The other method is in targeting competitive keywords such as Pepsi or Coke. These more prime keywords do indeed require backlinks… some more than others and some you’ll never in your wild dreams rank for.

One thing I should mention real quick is the fact that by default, unless the author of the blog has hacked their blog, comment links are NOFOLLOW, meaning credit for the link isn’t given. Many wordpress bloggers have figured out how to manually remove the nofollow attribute or actually have a plugin installed that does it for them.

There isn’t many people that have DOFOLLOW blogs when you compare these people against all the other blogs online. Also too, to break things down even further, there is a large % of dofollow blogs that have turned their blogs into a bad place to have your link on for the fact that they get busted for attempting to game Google.

-TheYoungGuy