Ted Kubaitis once managed organic search for a retailer with 25,000 SKUs and 500 categories. He feared competing against Amazon for rankings until he realized most of its product pages had zero backlinks. Then an epiphany hit.

"All it took was 25 backlinks," he told me.

Ted is now the founder of SEO Tool Lab, a prominent agency and software provider, and the host of "SEO Fight Club," a YouTube show.