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As I have worked as an SEO consultant over the last few years it always amazes me how caught up people get with their competitors. It seems that some times they spend more time looking at their competition to see what they are doing than they do building their own business.

What is the benefit of knowing what your competition is doing? Do you just believe that everything they do is the right way to do things and you want to copy them? You have absolutely no control over what they are doing.

Spend time worrying about what YOU are doing. Look at your own site. Ask yourself, what can I be testing to increase conversion? How can I increase traffic? What new product can I create? What article can I write to add good content to my site?

Go back and read my guide to SEO and make sure you are doing everything you need to be doing on your site to increase your rankings.

The focus needs to be on what YOU are doing to YOUR site. Don’t worry about your competitors. Do the right things and you will eventually beat out your competitors, or at least steal a large piece of the pie. Don’t worry, there is enough to go around.

I have mentioned in the past that link building is probably priority number 1 when it comes to SEO. There are many ways to build links and some are much more effective than others.

I want to teach you a little about getting new links through article submission. There are about 5  major article submission websites.

www.ezinearticles.com
www.articlesbase.com
www.buzzle.com
www.searchwarp.com
www.goarticles.com

These websites allow you to submit an article which you have written to their article directories and they will post the article for all to see, including search engines. The neat thing about it is you can add links to your article and point those links right back to your website.

This is a very easy way to get a few links pointing to your website. It is especially simple if you are just starting out and are wondering how you can build links to your site.

Now keep in mind that some of these article sites may use “No-follow” tags on the links you place in the article. A no-follow tag tells a search engine to ignore the link or in other words, not to crawl the link and follow it to it’s destination. So from an SEO standpoint you get little or no value.

However, I have seen time and time again that because some of these article sites are so big and trusted by Google, your article will end up ranking on page one of Google for key phrases in your industry. When people actually go to the article page and see your link you can get some free direct traffic from it.

Either way, it is worth it to at least submit a couple of articles to these sites. Ezinearticles.com is the site we have used the most and is probably the most trusted among search engines. Note: Don’t submit the same article to all of these websites. Try to create a unique article for any submission you do.

I have seen over the years that if you build your link popularity naturally you can move up in the search rankings fairly quickly even if your website is new. In fact I have done it enough that when it doesn’t happen I am very surprised.

That is why I have been confused when working with a friend of mine who started a website about 4 and a half months ago. He has implemented full boar every single thing I ever asked him to do. He is very motivated and so often does more than I ask him to do. Based on my past (and current) experience by now his site should be showing on page 1 of Google for hundreds of terms and his site should be generating a lot of income.

For some reason though, his rankings aren’t there. After looking into the issue I noticed that websites ranking on the first page of Google for his competitive key phrases have under 1000 back links. These are websites that have been around for several years.

So I did a backlink check for my friends website that is 4 months old and he is showing 22,000 backlinks. This huge disparity is probably throwing up a big red flag to the search engines that a new site is getting that many links.

Even though he could have naturally acquired these links, the difference in the amount his competitors have from how many links he has makes it so his link building doesn’t appear natural to the search engines. Because of this they have probably put his site into a mini sandbox.

Eventually I expect his rankings to hit and hit hard and he will start making a lot of money but until his site gets more age, and the search engines see that he will keep getting more links, he will just have to wait.

What you should take away from this? – Don’t get too many links too quickly as it can have a negative effect on your rankings. Especially avoid site-wide links in the beginning if you can help it.

Search Engine Optimization 101

Search engine optimization is so important to the overall success of an internet business because the traffic you get from search engines is all free. Some of the websites we run get over 90% of their traffic from search engines. I don’t pay a dime for any of the 35,000 visitors a month we get to these sites. It is also important because if you know SEO well, you can start an internet business in any industry and make money there.

I have been doing SEO as a full time profession for the past 6 years on over 300 websites. My own SEO copmpany website is in the top 5 of Google for “SEO services” and “SEO consultant”The reason I tell you this is because I want you to know that I am proficient in SEO and know which SEO principles actually work and the techniques that aren’t worth your time.

I will try and give you sound practical SEO advice that you can easily understand and quickly implement to optimize your own site to the fullest. I will use specific examples so you can get a good idea of what I am talking about.

On Page Optimization

There are eleven major checkpoints that I could come up with when it comes to optimizing your website. I will teach you how to implement all of these into your site.

1. Keyphrase Research
2. Creating unique titles for each page
3. Writing the meta tags for each page
4. Creating Alt tags
5. Creating SEO friendly content
6. Link Building (Priority #1)
7. Setting up proper website structure
8. Having good website navigation
9. White Hat vs. Black Hat SEO
10. Continuing SEO For The Long Term
11. SEO Checklist – 10 Must Do’s

Here is a list of 10 things you should do to ensure successful search engine rankings.

1. Did you do in depth research to find the most targeted key phrases to optimize for?
2. Do you have unique titles and descriptions on each page?
3. Do you have at least 150 words of unique original content on every page of the site?
4. Are the key phrases you want to rank for embedded naturally into the content of your pages?
5. Do you have a sitemap that links to every page on the site? Is there a link to the sitemap page on the home page?
6. Are you adding at least 1-2 new pages of content each week?
7. Are you getting at least 5 new links each week?
8. Is the anchor text of your new links the key phrases that you want to rank for?
9. Are you pointing some of your links to internal pages of your site?
10. Are you spending time each week checking out resources to learn more about SEO?