When you're researching how to get your website to rank in search engines, what do you do? Do you consult with ebooks? Do you prefer to troll through forums looking for answers? These are all viable tactics to use, but one tried and true method works especially well online: see what your competitors are doing.

Google Search For Your Keywords

Here's your first step: search Google (or whichever SE you prefer) and see what the top organic listings are. Now you know who your top competitors are for those keywords. Go to these sites and see what they're doing to rank so highly for the words that you want. Are they doing something special with their meta? Do they have great backlinks? Do they have lots of fresh content targeting the words?

Look through these sites and you'll see some great new ways for you to improve your site. That's the great thing about working online: everyone's work is on display for you to inspect. You'll be able to benefit from other people's years of experience and use it to help your site.

Beating Competitors, Not Machine

When you're online, you don't need to make exactly what Google wants. Nope, it's much easier than that. That's the thing with Google, Yahoo and the other search engines, they're quite good at what they do and you can't beat machine. Luckily for you, you don't need to beat machine, you just need to beat your competitors. This is why doing a competitor analysis is pivotal for building high ranking websites.

Once you've seen how everyone else is doing it and how they are getting their rankings, all you need to do is do things slightly better. Make yourself stand out from the crowd and you'll start getting those rankings.