Sounds good and thank you for your 2 replies. The backlinks side of things does make sense. I will need to try using Alexa for that a bit more to look up links to other sites. I was focused on it with my own site and it did not seem very useful for that (google's tools seemed to be more helpful).

At this point I have not been doing a lot of research into other sites and just focused on growing my own. But the next step will be looking at other sites more.

For my own site I have been using google search console to track incoming links.

SEO is very interesting to me and I'm still learning. I have enjoyed reading your articles about it. My site will be 6 months old at the end of the month but already search traffic is my single largest source of traffic. Did not start that way but it surpassed all the other traffic sources this month. I'm on page 1 for several terms and page 2 for some others. Each week the traffic from organic searches just goes up (currently on track to bring 1,000 unique users to my site in May--up from 600 in April) and my ranking continues to improve :) Steady progress!