Some general facts about our sites?

Just to get an idea of what we deal with...

[youfoundjake]

Ok, Since im asking about yours, I'll tell about mine.
I have about 200 pages, all original content hand typed by me.
Forum, blog, and RSS feeds in addtion to main content.
Its a cross of html and php
My main keyword yields 80 million results on google, 22 million on yahoo
Im not in the serps in the first 1000 results.
My domain age is 7 months, my top competitor, 9 years.
Yahoo has about 35000 searchs a month on my main keyword, not sure what google does, but I think I can safely double it.
I primarily get all my traffic from ppc, with the random search every once in a while. I have a fair amount of long tails, but ideally, I'm looking for my main keyword. I guess I'm going through growing pains, anyone got any hope they can spare?
How are you situated?

[jdancing]

Keep adding content and buying one way links and hope for the best.

You probably should have gotten a head start by purchasing an abandoned but established domain that was already in the indexes. Spending a few dollars up front for immediate results is much better then toiling away for 2 or 3 years while you wish for rankings.

[youfoundjake]

In addition, my site is a PR2, was a PR5, but I lost the ibl from wikipedia. I don't sell anything on the site, primarily built for information for people searching about widgets.
Its definitely my first real site, and of course, everything I learn along the way will be incorporated into 3 other sites, the 4th site being the biggest and most difficult one to design. Again, all the sites aren't selling anything, just a location of resources. I do it to have the information available, 2 of them specifically for that reason, adsense, cj and amazon were not the reasons the sites were built, didn't even know about them until I got serious about my building and reading everywhere. Now its just a bonus for me.

[daveVk]

I have a fair amount of long tails, but ideally, I'm looking for my main keyword

You have 200 pages, assumably each adresses something more specific than main keyword, you have better chance of making page one of serps on these topics. Why look for main keyword, what proportion of search visiters are to home page?

[youfoundjake]

All the pages are in relation to the main keyword
If widgets are my keyword and I have a page about selling widgets
another about purchasing widgets
widget maintence
who else has widgets
your favorite widgets
types of widgets
find widgets in your area
suggest a widget

As you can see, the main keyword is pretty darn important on my site. I think that if someone is searching for "types of widgets", my site comes up towards the top, but that search may be 100 times a month across the 3 major engines. However, "widgets" is searched probably 100,000 times across the 3 engines. See how much of a difference it makes?

But I digress...
Did anyone else wonder how long it would take for their site to "take off" or did it happen immediately?

Are you firing on all 8 cylinders for your site? Are you at the top for your particular niche?
The leader in my is a government website, so I doubt I'll ever be number 1, but number 2 is quite a possibility, except they have a domain age of 6 years and something link 1000 ibl's that google displays...

Do you try and get alot of ibl's in order to compensate for a short domain age? At what point does the number of IBL move the PR?

[daveVk]

The way I see the arithmatic is. Longtail = 200 pages * 100 searchs/months * 1/10 conversion = 2000 visitors/month. Main keyword alone, not in top 1000 = no conversions = 0 visitors. Making it into top 1000 within 80,000,000 may noy be easy.