There are millions of web sites trying to get listed in the top 20 spots of the major search engines. That amounts to an awful lot of competition and even after spending hours and hours on Search Engine Optimization techniques you may still not be able to achieve a high ranking for your competitive keywords!

However, if it proves too difficult for you to get high rankings directly, there are still ways that you can get to the top.......indirectly!

So, just how do you do this?

Firstly, look up the top 20 web sites on the major search engines under the keywords and phrases people would find your web site. If you could either advertise on those sites, or get a link from those sites to yours then that would be nearly as good as having a top listing yourself.

The most expensive way to do this would be to buy ad space on those web sites. However, if you don't want to spend any money to do this, you could use the ten strategies below.

These strategies may not of course apply to every web site but I'm sure there'll be at least two or three that you can make use of straight away....

1. Participate on their discussion boards. You could post questions, answer other peoples questions, and join in on conversations. Just include your signature file and link to your website at the end of your messages.

2. Ask the web site owner if they would like a free ebook to giveaway to their visitors. You could have them link to your web site or include your ad in the free ebook.

3. Submit content to their web site. You could write articles for their web site and include your resource box and link at the end of the article. If they publish it, you'll indirectly be at the top of the search engines.

4. Write an excellent ...

The latest techniques used by web masters for making the overall design, structure, and keyword pattern of your website relevant to search engines and web directories where the site has to been submitted. This technique, readily available by professionals in any quality SEO company or firm, allows search engines and directories, both human indexed, and spider indexed, to properly categorize and rank your site to be found when a user makes a search.

SEO explains the different search engines and web directories which keywords are most relevant to your website, so that they will obtain high ranking when someone makes a search for that keyword. Search engine ranking is very important because the majority of internet users will only look at the first sites listed whenever they do a search. Therefore, even if your page is listed 12th with Google for a given keyword, it may never be seen by web users, because they simply don’t scroll that far down the list.

For this reason, it’s very important that you include correct SEO strategies into your website. This may involve hiring an SEO firm or an SEO company for their different services.

Among the most common SEO services are articles. These are articles written with interesting or informative contents, but which have been structured specifically around a specific keyword. Therefore, if your company sells widgets, you might want to include an article on your website that uses the word “widgets company” throughout its paragraphs.

To come up with your keywords, try to think about the different ways that you’d search for your own website. Think about your services, your products, the information that you provide, and the type of customer you’ll want to attract. You can either make your own list, or use a computer program that is designed for coming up with the different words that will work the best for you. If you sign up an SEO company, they will likely have that sort of program available. It allows you to simply give an idea, such as “widgets”, and it will come up with all of the relevant search words that people use, and will tell you how many other sites already come up in search engines when that word or group of words is used.

There is a trick to writing a correct SEO based article. Although it may seem as though you can simply write a regular article and plug in your keyword, there are actually some other things that you need to consider. For example, if you use the keyword too frequently, many search engines will not recognize it as SEO, but will instead see it as SPAM.

This is where experts seem to disagree. While some believe that the keyword should be used once within the title of the article, and up to ten times throughout the rest of the text, others believe that ...