To determine how many, the first thing you want to do is go to Yahoo.com rather than Google or MSN. Once there search for the term "linkdomain:___" and then the type in web site you want to inquire about using the Yahoo search box. This will take you to Yahoo's Site Explorer site.

When you do this for your site you will see two boxes at the top of the page. One will show the number of pages on your website, and the second will show the total number of inbound links to your site. These are your backlinks. You will also see a list of where those backlinks come from. This can be very useful.

Now if you want to see what you need to do to outrank that pesky competitor of yours, it wouldn't hurt to enter their domain name the same way and see how many backlinks they have. You might also want to check out who they are. There is often a good chance you can get back links from some of the same places.

Now as we mentioned, not all backlinks are created equal. Some have higher page rank and are thus weighted more than others. So it's possible that someone with fewer backlinks could rank higher.

As an experiment, go to Google and enter the keyword "Home Decorating" in the Google Search Box. When I did it for this article the top three "organic" listings were home-decorating-made-easy.com ; tuscan-home-101.com and hgtv.com

I looked at each site with the Yahoo Site Explorer and found the top ranking site had 627 pages of content and 1726 back links. The second ranked site, the tuscan one, had 88 pages of content and 794 backlinks. I believe the number of backlinks to be the major determinant in the higher ranking by home decorating made easy site.

But what about the third place site, HGTV? It has 203,974 pages and 7,285,773 backlinks. A behemoth by anyone's standards. This is where relevance plays a role. HGTV has a lot of pages and backlinks, but not all of them were specifically relevant to the keyword term "Home Decorating." At least not in Google's eyes.

If you enjoyed this exercise, play around with a few other keywords, and see if the number of backlinks doesn't seem to play a role in most of them. As you do, you will come to appreciate how important backlinks are to ranking.