If you haven\’t got some form of search engine optimisation strategy in place then your website is in danger of bobbing around the search engine results rudderless. Which means that you are leaving the fate of your website in the hands of other people. Here\’s help on how to change that for the better.

Analyse your competition\’s pages

Spend an hour or two searching the internet to double check that you know who your competitors are.

In most industries, this changes over time as some competitors rest on their laurels whilst others put extra effort into their SEO.

Once you\’ve found two or three competitors who are regularly beating you in the search results, take a long hard look at their pages. Not just the page you see in your web browser but also the HTML and CSS side of things that shows up when you view the source code of their pages.

This will show you how their pages are structured and how they deal with the important SEO factors such as page titles, headlines, image names and so forth.

You can then do the same analysis on your own website to see where you\’re lagging behind the people who are beating you in the search results.

Analyse your competition\’s backlinks

There are various services available on the internet which will show you the quantity of sites pointing to any particular website. None of them are totally accurate but – with the exception of Google\’s results – they\’re accurate enough. Google long ago decided not to report many of the backlinks it\’s aware of, figuring that this isn\’t a natural search for people to indulge in unless they\’re a sneaky webmaster trying to get one up on the other people in their industry.

When you get a list of the sites linking back to your competitors, take a look at a sample of the sites. See whether the link is in a links section or if it\’s woven into the main text of the page (the latter is generally thought to be better in terms of SEO).

See whether you – as a human rather than a search engine robot computer – think the site is decent quality.

Emulate the better links.

You\’ll need to construct your search engine optimisation strategy to do this over a period of weeks, months or even years depending on the size of the task.

Then work out how you can upstage your competitors backlinks. Either in terms of quantity or, preferably, in terms of quality.

Once you\’ve done this yourself, or paid an SEO company to run the analysis through their software to do the hard work for you, you\’ll have a better idea of the task ahead of you.

If you mainly cater for local customers then there\’s a good chance that appearing better in the Google Places list will be one of the strategic decisions you make.

The important thing to remember with any search engine optimisation strategy is that you need to keep doing it. Otherwise your competition will gradually overtake you in the search results.

Author Bio: Get more help with your search engine optimisation strategy and check out how these affordable search engine optimisation packages can help you.

Category: Internet
Keywords: search engine optimisation strategy,search results,search engine results,seo strategy