Increasing Compeitition in SEO

SEO is eventually a race to the top with the top ten being just ten in number. Wikipedia takes up one or two positions in most searches and Youtube, Facebook or LinkedIn bring in a couple of results in the top ten. Add to this high profile news and media websites and directories and the top page of ten is really only five positions that we can aspire for. Therefore SEO is really about bring in a world-wide race to get to the top 5 positions for the first page and maybe top twenty-five positions globally for the first three pages.

Businesses need to appreciate that SEO takes time, is difficult and need a very structured and patient methodology. Since businesses require being very careful about reputations, good SEO practices must be applied at all times. Unethical practices are likely to be discovered in an age of increasing intelligence and speeds of robots and crawlers. More than this your own reputation as a strong, ethical and professional business is likely to take a beating.

In order to succeed in search engine optimisation in the current environment a few suggestions:
1. Ensure that your web designer understands the structure and importance of SEO and incorporates good practices into the design, content and programming of the pages.
2. Have a defined search engine optimisation strategy before you begin your new web design and define your content and website structure to make it very search engine friendly.
3. Hire a good SEO service provider who you can trust and who you are sure uses ethical and structured rules to improve ranking.
4. Set up short term and long term goals and define time frames for them. A short term goal could be bringing the website into the first few pages of ranking for select keywords in a period of two-three months and a long term goal can be bringing the website into the first page for one or two keywords with a year of work.
5. Use analytics to measure the net traffic that specific keywords bring to your website and weed out the keywords that do not generate traffic. There is no point in optimising for keywords and feeling proud of being on the first page if the keywords do not have adequate search volume that can translate into visits to your website.
6. Skirt the more popular and competition intensive keywords initially and take the lower profile ones to begin with and gradually build traffic with small increases.
7. Content is finally king and no matter what you do please do spend time to write content for your website, blog, press releases and articles.
8. A good SEO service provider should be able to write these for you and your choice of SEO provider should be one who is equipped with a good copy writer who can write out good content for you.
9. Assign all directory and article submissions to the SEO expert and stop doing them yourself as these submissions need to be done well and with specific formats and you can easily undo the work of your SEO provider by creating incorrect submissions that conflict and compete with those that your SEO partner has done.
10. Review the progress and further planning every couple of weeks with the SEO service provider and keep your focus on the numbers of traffic that are coming to your website. This should be your main metric for the performance of your search engine optimisation programme.