Beating Your Competition in the Search Engines!

Search engine optimization (SEO) is actually more complicated than most people realize. After all, not every business needs results from the search engines. Some businesses only need local results. Then there are businesses that rely on search engines for 100% of their revenue.

Once you figure out what your basic needs are, then you have to determine who your real online competition is. In traditional terms, your competition is the business down the street. On the Internet, however, your competition is the website that is beating you out on your keywords. Your competition might not even sell the same products or services as you. If he is getting your search engine traffic, he is the competition.

Know Your Keywords

Your keywords are your “turf” on the Internet. Your success depends on two things. First, what are the keywords that represent your products or services? You should be able to figure that out on your own. Secondly, what are the keywords your clients are searching for when they want the products or services you offer?

Let’s say that you sell cars. If you sell Chevrolet vehicles, you can easily guess a few keywords. It is not a surprise that “Chevrolet dealership” is a key phrase. Since your prospective customers are generally searching within one city, you do not have to beat out the whole world for “Chevrolet Dealership”. You must have to beat out the local competitors. Phrases such as “Chevrolet Dealership Houston” or “Houston Chevrolet Dealership”, will be easier to target and will produce your best results.

Know the Competition

Search Google.com, Yahoo.com, msn.com, and see who comes up in the top five results for your most important keywords. It does not matter if those sites sell cars. You want to be on top for your phrase so whatever comes up … that is your competition.

Beat Them at Their Own Game

Analyze those sites for the most common SEO tactics. Then whatever they are doing, you should one-up them in every respect.

Here are a few tips on what to look for:

Keyword frequency – How many times do they use the words you are targeting? Count them. Use those words and phrases more frequently and more times.

Inbound links – How many links do they have coming in? Search google.com using this format: link:www.anythinginternet.com

Prominent Keywords – Bolded keywords, keywords in the website address, keywords in the title bar, and keywords in headings are all considered important.

There are many other things to look for. I recommend you hire a professional SEO consultant if search engine results are important to you. These tips will help you optimize a few of the most obvious parts of your web page. There are a lot more things to do. You want your keywords in your page title, your META tags, and you want to optimize every page on your website.

Increasing the number of inbound links can be a lot of work. If your competition has a lot of these, you should hire a professional to help you compete. Experts can add hundreds of new inbound links for you quite easily.

If you make changes to your website, prepare to wait a long time for those changes to be 100% effective. Some things could take six months to become fully effective.