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In this day and hour of the internet, with the increasingly heavy competition even among niche markets, 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 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 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 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 can be a monumental task, but it will dramatically increase your search engine listings.

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

About the author:

If you would like to find a program that automates most of the things we mentioned in the article, go to http://www.phase1.ws. While you're there, you can pick up Tim's FREE ebook, full of SEO tips, tricks and techniques to help you dominate the search engines.