Increasingly heavy competition even among niche markets

In this day and hour of the internet, with the, it is important to do everything that you can to increase your search engine rankings.

While implementing a linking strategy is the top priority of most internet marketers, the fact of the matter is that you need to do everything you can to increase your edge over the competition, and one of those ways is to effectively use niche markets on page optimization.

First of all, let's do a little research on the competition and see what they are doing.

If you have a list of keywords that you are targeting to promote your website, grab them and head over to Google. If you don't have a list of keywords or keyphrases, you should sit down and do a little research and see what keywords you niche markets should target.

Now, select the keywords that you want to target - the more specific and niche oriented the better.

Just make sure that people actually search for those keywords.

If you aren't sure how often those keywords searched for, go to the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool or Wordtracker to find out just how often, and in the case of Wordtracker, just how competitive your keywords are.

Type in your keyword and see what comes up. Then go to the first two or three sites that are listed under that keyword.

Look at how the pages of these sites are optimized and make a few notes.

You want to check:

-how they have used their heading tags -how often they have repeated the keyword on the page -if they put keywords in the alt tags of their images (put your mouse overtop of the pictures on their pages and see if anything comes up) -if they have the keyword in the title of the page -if they named the page after the keyword (e.g. - keyword.html) -if they used the keyword in any of their meta tags. Go to "View" on your web browser (in Internet Explorer) and down to "View Source" to see what they have put in niche markets their meta tags -if the keyword is a part of their url

Once you have taken note of the above for the top two or three sites, go back to Google again and type in "link:[http://www.competitor's-website-address-here.com]", putting the url of the page you just checked into the "[http://www.competitor's-website-address-here.com]" section above.

This will bring up a list of the other websites that are currently linking to them.

Now that you have analyzed the top two or three websites listed for that one keyword, you want to imitate what they have done and go a little further.

Get out your list of how each site was optimized, and look to see what each of your competitor's haven't done.

Go through the list provided above and see how you can improve on their current on page optimization strategy.

For example, if they have forgotten to use the keyword in the title of their page, you can do all of the on page optimization that they have done, but go one step further and put your keyword in the page's title.

Or, if they only have a few sites with low Page Rank linking to them, you could make it your goal to get a few more sites linking to you than them, or to get sites that have a higher Page Rank linking to your site.

You want to see what they have done and then optimize a little bit more. This will ensure that you have a successful strategy, as you will be adding to their already proven on page seo strategy.

You want to do this for each keyword that you are going to target. It's a monumental task, but it will dramatically increase your search engine listings.

Now, you could spend hours on this whole process if you want to (and save yourself a little money in the process), or you could get a tool like the new version of SEO Elite and automate the majority of this process.

This program has saved me hundreds of hours by automatically analyzing well optimized sites and giving me the results in an easy to read format.

To be honest, I'd rather not spend countless hours researching how my competitors are optimizing their pages if I don't have to. Spending a few dollars for a program that does this (and other things) for me was well worth it as far as I am concerned.

Once you have analyzed the competition and have a search engine optimization plan of action, you need to build your pages.

If you are creating a site that will have one page specifically niche markets optimized for each keyword that you want to target - which is really what you should be doing - you may want to check out http://www.nichedirectorygenerator.com.

This program will dramatically speed up your whole site building process.

All you need to do is design a template for your website, give the program a list of the keywords that you want the pages to be optimized for and it generates a webpage specifically optimized for each keyword.

The trick here is in how you design your website template.

You must always start from scratch, laying out everything on your page according to what your competitors have done for their on page search engine optimization strategy. Don't copy their layout, but keep in mind approximately where they placed their keywords in relation to the design of their site. Get out the list you made earlier and do what they did.

Once you specify exactly where you want each keyword to be on the page, niche directory generator will provide you with custom, keyword (or keyphrase) optimized pages.

Just a note - niche directory generator allows you to have articles displayed randomly on your pages throughout the site using JavaScript.

Now, search engine spiders don't read JavaScript, so they won't know what your article says, so they will index your pages based on what's in your template. As your template is optimized with your keywords, the search engine spiders will see that your page is keyword rich (having a fairly high amount of keywords vs. the total amount of text on the page) and will rank your pages accordingly - so you may see a higher search engine ranking as a result.

However, the drawback to this is that the people who come niche markets to your site see randomly posted articles on your pages - so they may not get the content that they want.

Also, if search engine spiders feel that your site has too many keywords for the page and not enough content (as it can't see what's in the JavaScript), it may exclude your site from its listings or give your site a little lower ranking.

The choice is yours.

Personally, I'd use niche directory generator to design niche markets an optimized template and then add my own personalized content for each page, rather than using JavaScript to randomly place articles on my site.

I think it's a better long term strategy, even if it costs me a few spots in the search engine rankings for now