Rule #1. Your website should be the best or really good.

  Good design, fresh ideas, innovative products, and extra features. Website seems to be done and ready to launch. Now you probably think how to reach your competitors who already years online and had enough time to promote their websites and receive deserved rankings.

  Marketing analysis is the first thing you should start from. If you believe that you have no competitors it means that you are a genius or you never studied your market. Find related websites and see how they rank on search engines. Type keywords you want to target on Google and see how many good companies rank there.

  Ranking options:

• Google shows only 1-10 good companies in top 20 results mixing other results with random related information. You have a good chance to reach the top.
• Google shows 10-50 good companies which occupy first 10 pages mixing other results with information articles, blogs, news, related information. It is possible to get top results within several months working hard.
• Google shows over 50 - 200 good companies mixing other results with articles, blogs, news, related information. Website promotion will take long time with money or time investment.
• Google shows 200+ companies ranking on top well known firms and corporations. Website should be more than good with potential to go viral.

  Extra tips:

• Wikipedia page shown on #1 position with high competitive keyword. It means that there is the biggest competition in this field. Keyword example: SEO
• Look how many companies bid for specific keywords in sponsored results.

  Understanding who rank on top.

  Visit websites which rank on top and compare their design, structure, features. Find their Pagerank, Alexa rank, Technorati rank (importance in blogosphere). Look how many websites link them back using backlink checkers or Yahoo database by typing in search bar link:competitor-domain-name.com.

  Finding weak point in Google results.

  When you type a keyword and the Iast strong company rank #26 with lower positions occupied by weak companies with poor content, design, and backlink portfolio I call it weak position. It means that your site can get at least #27 position right away if you provide good content and can receive some backlinks from quality sites. From this point you can begin a real fight to rank on top. Every good backlink building or marketing campaign ( building strong profiles in social sites, submission in quality directories, viral success which brings natural backlinks etc) moves your site higher.

  Anchor text.

  Building the same anchor is the biggest SEO mistake. Targeting one keyword building hundreds backlinks could lead to punishment for keyword spam. It is not only for Google… MSN for example could be very strict about it and one day you could realize that MSN / Live search completely removed your domain from rankings.

  Moving from one promotional campaign to another.

  Once website reached some good positions after link building campaigns you should review what have been done and try something new. Google algorithm is very tricky and it gives a good credit when you build backlinks but at some point it can stop. Google doesn’t like when webmasters build links, they love natural links. Their algos will see if you reached good positions writing articles and submitting website in directories only. Your link similarities will point Google that you don’t have natural backlinks and site will be placed on certain positions without ability to increase them or even dropped in serps. To look natural, backlinks should come from different sources like blogs, articles, news, press releases, directories, forums, social bookmarking sites, social media communities etc.

  Make others webmasters to link your site.

  Create link this page field or widgets for your members, it will make process of receiving natural backlinks easier. Open a weblog or news section; write powerful articles which people will love to bookmark and link. Allow your employees to blog and join social communities.

  Hire third party people to help (SEO expert / SEO company).

  Independent review and search engine optimization help will never hurt your site. Even if you are SEO guru it is always important to see if you missed something and someone can find/ fix it.