It's not that simple.

The linkbacks should contain a few different anchor texts.
I would shoot for a few hundred good quality backlinks to beat them.

make sure that your onpage seo is better than your competitor and keep building backlinks until you're better than them

Vanquish - having the exact keyword as the anchor text 100% of the time looks very suspicious. Remember Google doesn't think we should try to influence SERPs so a few different (but relevant) anchors text usually works better.

Samuel - Look at the links the no1 site has. Try to gain links on the same sites as them and then look for an additional 50 or so to help your ranking move up in Google.

If possible it can be highly effective to send your competitors an article with a backlink included.

Ranking is not a number game and the one which scores highest in backlinks wins the race. It's a combination of all the on page and offpage activities we do for our site with quality guidelines. for eg. a site with less baclinks from high PR and theme related sites is much better than one with backlinks of non-theme related sites or links on low page rank webpages.
Dont forget the on page optimization of site which is also a crucial factor in deciding ranking.

Simply getting more backlins cannot gurantee you the higher ranking. you should analyze the quality of the backlinks...Quality I mean the relevance and their aurhority status in google...

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Do a linkdomain:sitename on yahoo, replicate the backlinks & keeping adding content and you will outrank, 98 backlinks is easy.

It also depends what the PR is of the sites that are linking to your blog. It's always better to trade links with sites that are within your niche.

Think about it. That's exactly what "google bombing" is. All the sites use the same backlink anchor text to make a site (in this case a hijacked site) rank higher. The real benefit for varying them would be to possibly make the site rank higher for multiple keywords which overall could result in more traffic.

Backlinks is not the only parameter for getting the top of google results. You need to get the keyword used well.

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I think the best way is to get backlinks that are relevant to your site, relevancy now plays a vital role in google's algorithm. If you are trying to rank for a dog site, backlinks for high quality dog sites will be the best. However you should also not discount the power of backlinks from other non related sites. The best will be to concentrate on backlinks from related sites and still continue to use other methods.

The guys are right - links are important, but so is the quality of the links and your domain you are linking to.

Continue to build links (but not too fast - 1 a day or so)

Think of it like working out at the gym and eating right.

You can work out as much as you want (build backlinks) but if you're eating the wrong food (ie your site is poor for SEO) you aren't doing yourself justice - you have to go to the gym AND eat right.

Alf

How did you determine it only has 98 backlinks?

very good info all over the thread.... everyone should go through it to learn more about backlinks and advantage..

I would just say that keep building backlinks - Blog comments, forums, directories etc...