In order to get ahead of your competitors, you'll have to find out what they're doing, understand it, and then do better.

It all boils down to a simple process: Analyze how your competitors are achieving their high positioning, then use and improve upon their methods in order to obtain superior listings for your own website.

Step 1: Identify Your Competition

Begin by searching the top eight SEs, and make a list of the top five or six websites in the search results. Now change the order of your keywords and do the search again. Add the top five or six sites to your list (some may be the same). Finally change the keyword order and repeat this process one last time. You should have a fairly good list of your competition. Keep this list in your search engine 3-ring binder.

Step 2: Examine Your Competitions' Webpage HTML

Make hardcopies of your competitors' webpage HTML. Carefully study how they structure their HTML in order to achieve high search engine rankings. It is important that you study and understand what your competition is doing.

To print, simply use your browser to view their HTML source code, then print a hardcopy. Put these hardcopies in your search engine 3-ring binder. This will make it easy to reference at a later time. On each copy, write the search engine and position obtained that this HTML is responsible for.

Step 3: Identify Your Competitions' Keywords

Next find the keywords used by your competition. Keep this list of keywords in your search engine 3-ring binder.

Step 4: Make a Keywords List

Combine all the keywords from step 3 and remove any duplicates. Keep the more popular keywords at the top of your list, and eliminate any which don't apply to your site.

Step 5: Identify Potential Link Partners

Find out who is providing links to your competitors sites, so you may later approach those sites and ask that they link to yours. Having other sites link to yours will not only help to increase your overall site traffic, but it will give you a higher "link popularity" score. This score is is used by some search engines to determine your site's ranking. If you site is popular (i.e. many other sites link to it) then you will score higher with the search engines.