SEO|The Full Insider SEO Details Exposed

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are:

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you dont know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they arent getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you dont have much reason to keep a link if you arent getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure its still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someones site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your sites content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says Disallow and has the URL of their links page, then theyre not letting spiders index that page. Dont exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being cloaked, and report it to the search engines if it is. You dont want to get involved with these people better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesnt necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldnt be more than 20 links if the site breaks this rule, dont even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking theyre helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them dont even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. Theres no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure youre prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.

Identifying the Leaders.

You need to start off by identifying the major players a good place to do this is Yahoos directory. Its not as comprehensive as it once was, but its good if youre looking for the major players. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches youre basically set as far as traffic goes.

Also consider that since Yahoo!s directory is the place that you look to find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out there. Its all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. Alexa is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each sire you visit, telling you whether its in the top 100, the top 1000, the top 10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders.

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for.

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything thats different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill.

2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website.

3. See what advertising campaigns and offers theyre running.

4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customers point of view.

5. See if you can figure out their strategy.

When youre dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have made about their website.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.

Now, summarize the information youve found into a few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering these will depend on your own websites strengths. If youre small, then youll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think youll need to take for you site to come out on top. Once youve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated market.

Dont get frightened away prematurely, though make sure you know what youre getting into before you start, and dont let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they cant find anywhere else.