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Increasing Competition in SEO

Guest post by: Nikhil Narayan

Article Overview: SEO gets more competitive and challenging by the day. Search engines are constantly in a quest for better and more relevant results that are objective and not susceptible to manipulation by search engine optimizers. The number of businesses that are willing to hire search engine experts to bring their websites to the top in rankings increases constantly bringing into the fold of SEO specialists an ever increasing number of professionals and organizations.

Increasing Competition 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. This means that the sensitiveness and work involved in SEO is increasing by the day. The methods have also multiplied. If earlier it was only page optimization and reciprocal links today there are several more methods available including blogs, article submissions, paid submissions and press releases among many more that are creatively discovered by SEO experts as they try to get to the top of the honours list in the search engines.

Does it make sense to use a SEO service provider? I believe it does since the increased visibility and reach that SEO offers is substantially more than what other forms of internet marketing offer and SEO with an expert service provider is a more reliable method with defined ROI than for instance email marketing. This does not mean that the other methods should not be applied. All that I am suggesting is that a portion of your online marketing budget should include paying a good SEO service provider to ensure that your website is always up there in the rankings for your main keywords and several other secondary ones.

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.

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Article Tags: search engine optimisation, search engine optimization, seo



Related Forum Posts
Re: Congratultations to GT! - Hi GT, Competition is great and i know I wouldn't be here without it, but it is not the main reason for posting and participating. But I admit, it is the trigger I need to get some work done. If there is none, i create one for myself and try to make it. First prize is ice cream.
Re: Is Google Search getting better or worse? - Competition and that too stiff is something I have always loved and being a true web user I hate spammers the same way and so I am very happy with the recent changes that Google has made and so I must say that it is getting better. I am happy because now we could be able to get and read fresh and unique content instead of the repetitive ones. Now the value of actual SEO will be seen as results now will be completely depend on the hard work SEO and strategies an internet marketing company will apply to get on top of search giant's ranking. surfing the web daily as addiction I have seen most of the webmasters asking several questions related to real time search and how they should commence now to get better and faster results, found lots of useful information and learned new strategies too.
Re: What Keyword research methods do you use? - Hi GT, Good post, I also typically use the Google Adwords keyword tool for no other reason than I have always used it. If other members have a better one they can recommend then please join the post. I have also found the Stealth Keyword Competition Analyzer extremely useful for selecting the most effective keywords to use. Back to Google, if they are main website keywords then I am looking for fairly large monthly global ‘exact’ searches but if it is just for extra weekly content then I am quite happy to run an article optimised with a long tail keyword phrase that may only have a monthly search of 200-300 because I know I have a better chance of ranking highly for that keyword phrase. regards, Mal.
Re: Help needed! - [quote="jeema":1rpkpkod]Hi, I’m a newly single mother who stays at home looking after my son. I have been writing for a long-long time but never thought to do something serious with it. I would like to try freelance copywriting, but don't know the first thing about it. How can I get started? Can anyone help me? I love writing and I could really-really use the extra cash- raising a young child alone really hits the wallet pocket. I appreciate any replies, and hope that I may be able to help in return sometime soon. Thank you very much.[/quote:1rpkpkod] Hi, Jeema It's easier than ever for writers (non-fiction writers, anyway!) to get work these days, via such sites as elance.com (they are who I do work for.) There are plenty of freelance sites on the web, where prospective customers post what they need, and prospective workers "bid" on the jobs, and then the customer chooses which writer he wants to do the work. There's lots of competition, but the wheat soon separates from the chaff and if you can write well, you can usually find steady employment. Competition drives down the price that you're able to charge, however, unless you have niche expertise such as technical or legal writing. PM me for some free advice, if you'd like!


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