A few questions to ask yourself …

If you’re ranking in the top 10 then you can ignore this list. However if you’re competitors are ranking ahead of you, perhaps the answer to your ranking issues lies in these questions.

Is your website cluttered with pictures or text? Is there a balance?
What keywords have you targeted vs the keywords your competitors have targeted?
Does your domain match your market?
How many inlinks do you have?
What Meta tags are you using?
Is your body text longer than 600 words?
What’s your page rank?
Is your site easy to navigate?

Answering some of these questions will help you better understand your competition. Analyzing your competitors and their sites will help you integrate some of those ideas into the theme of your site. Simply copying the competition is not the answer. Putting a different spin on a subject, offering great content, and building links will get you to the top.

Are you desperate enough to try black hat?

It’s a pretty dangerous path but if successful can get you ranked top 10. However Google engineers will eventually catch on and your Viagra sales will be short lived. On top of that once you get caught you will be blacklisted so be prepared to invest in a new domain. Before you consider going over to the dark side you should analyze the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Unless you happen to be trying to sell drugs in the ultra competitive Viagra market, most white hat strategies will get you some respectable results. I’m not saying don’t try it, I’m just saying be prepared to be punished when you get caught. Good luck.

SEO: getting started 4 quick steps

Take the cheap SEO way. Do it yourself! There are many SEO sites which can provide tons of useful info so what are you waiting for?

1. research your keywords. – purple elephants ivory tusks (probably not a good choice)

2. site content – make sure your text is there and any variants of it

3. get links – who’s gonna visit if nobody knows about your site, marketing is key

4. track progress – so how is your campaign going? exactly, keep stats, get better, learn, and rank.

When all of that fails contact an SEO professional.