A lot of your traffic will depend on how many other websites are linking to you.  A very simple way to compete on your chosen keywords without too much research is to copy your competitor.  It’s always been a pretty decent strategy: who’s beating me and how are they doing it, then replicate it plus more.

It’s the same with search engine rankings, a priceless FREE tool which I use  alot is Linkdiagnosis.  There are various other free and paid tools to do the same job (some people use yahoo explorer), but linkdiagnosis does it best in my opinion.

So what does it actually do?  Simple.  You put in your competitors URL, click start, sit back and let LD do the work for you.  It’ll then display (in any order you desire) all the pages linking to your competitor, with PR of each site, anchor text and status.  It’s your job to go to the sites listed and get yourself a backlink too.  Do this enough and you’ll soon see your page rise in the SERP’s.

As mentioned there are others, but none of them aggregate the data in such a useful way, you can also sign in and save all your searches so you can monitor your backlinks’ growth.

Mix this with your current SEO campaign efforts and you’ll be on your way up that #1 spot in no time.

Do basic on-page:

1. Keywords in domain name? Not always possible or appropriate to have your main keywords in the domain name, but does help quite a bit.
2. Keywords in the URL somewhere? Again in the homepage not always possible, but make sure you’ve got friendly URL’s with ‘-’ between words not ‘_’
3. Keyword(s) in meta title? Try to get your keywords in title, pretty important in the eyes of SE’s
4. Keywords in the meta description? Same as the title, don’t be spammy about it but try and get your main keywords in here
5. Text links. If not possible use CSS image replacement, or sIFR/cufon.  You still get the link read by spiders but it looks pretty.
6. Keywords in the H1 heading.
7. Links to authority sites on the subject your content refers to.  Yep, whack a couple of authority sites in there with dofollow status.
8. Keywords in actually body text. A few non-spammy keyword placement inside your body content.
9. Keyword prominence. Try to have your keywords at the beginning and at the end of the content.
   
10. Underline a keyword phrase in content
11. Bolden a keyword phrase in content
12. Alt text keywords. Don’t fill all alt text with keywords (not great practice to screw with blind people), but try to incorporate them so that they’re meaningful and relevant.
13. Update content often. New content is loved by SE’s and will keep them coming back to re-index new content
14. Document size. Optimise your images so the page loads quickly, good for both users and SE’s alike.
15. Keep it semantic. Your page should be semantic, with proper heading order.
16. Site/domain Age. You could buy and older domain, or buy your new domain for the next 5 years rather than monthly.  Generally and older site is a trusted one in the eyes of SE’s.

Off-Page Do’s

1. Relevant high quality one-way links.  From preferably high PR sites.  The more sites that link to you the better.
2. Relevant anchor text. Whoever’s linking to you are they using one or more of your keywords in the anchor text?
3. .EDU or .GOV are highly trusted. So try and get some links from these types of sites.
4. Directories. Used to be very popular but less and less important so it;s worth submitting to high quality directories like DMOZ
5. Submit your site’s sitemap.xml to the bg SE’s
6. Create a blog. Blogs should be updated and can get you great traffic and faster indexing if the content is decent.
7. Submit to social bookmarking sites, RSS feeds, twitter and all other web 2.0 properties. Good thing about having a blog is you’re likely to have an RSS feed, which you can submit to RSS indexing sites and get free backlinks from.
8. Ping new posts/web site changes: use pingler or pingoat
9. Tutorials: write tutorials on your chosen subject, submit them to various sites like tutorialized.com
10. Articles: E-zines etc all give free backlinks provided you write decent content.

Try not to be spammy at all as this wil get penalised.  Your aim should be longevity, not quick results.  Doing well in the SERP’s  – there is no whitehat quick and dirty trick to get good positions.  Focus on quality content and people will relish linking back to you.

This post will be updated as SE’s are always changing.