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Over the last few years I have been building content in my niche that I believe rivals some of the best content out there and deserves some attention. Although I have a plan to produce alot more content which I believe will take the quality and quantity of my content into a position among the top 5 or top 10 sites in my niche in the next 1-2 years, I decided that making that massive investment in content production irrespective of a consistent marketing plan is a recipe for failure because I need the positive feedback loop from site visitors to begin now, not in 2 years. Right now I'm in a position where I'm producing content that I think is better than alot of what's out there, and it's just not ranking the way I believe it should. I think I need to do a legitimate link building campaign to establish the website a little more firmly and put it on more level ground with some of its competitors. In Majestic SEO's "fresh index", most of my site's immediate competition have no more than 500 new domains in their links, though the biggest one has some 2,000. How can any link building effort I might take on possibly compare to links of this scale? Is there some "rule of thumb" for how many quality links I should aim for to get on square ground with some of the competitors on the lowest rungs? And if I try to build that many links at once, do I risk sending signals of untrustworthiness? (Assume I'm not going to be looking for any shoddy links, and in general will aim to follow Google guidelines.)

I am comparing Moz, WordTracker and Google keyword research tools and trying to figure out how I can compare the aggregated search volume for a page which targets several similar long-tail queries. For instance, according to one tool, the query 'printable guitar sheet music' has 125 monthly searches, but many small variations of this also have a similar amount. Do I just make a reasonable list and calculate them? Or do I just use "125" as an abstract number of measurement with no concrete reference to a **real **number of searchers, but useful in comparing one keyword to the next, and assume that all key words have a similar degree of consorting variations? I seem to remember Google used to give away some pretty damned useful information in the keyword search tool, including monthly search volume. But now it looks like the metric is not actual search volume, but a 1-100 score based on the search volume. So my questions are: Should I try to convert these numbers into real search figure estimates or just use them for comparing one to the next? Should I worry about trying to combine the aggregated variations of long tail keyword searches, or should I just choose one good keyword and let that represent all possible variations?