Content? Yes, content is king as always. Content is what was used to help boost my ranking. But how?

I create articles. These are quality articles, just like one you are reading now. These articles were not generated from any program. I authored content from my own knowledge and researched over 100 web sites that accept articles in my area of expertise. SEO happens to be a very popular topic. These sites agree to post my articles on their site, along with my url(s). Many of these sites have a decent Page Rank of their own. Their rank will transfer over to my site. Also, as time goes by, those articles will have a PR effect of their own which will transfer to my site(s). Don’t forget, other people may pick these articles up and use them on their site as well. They will also include my URL(s) on their sites. Now, if I do 100 sites a week times four articles a month, that's at least 400 articles a month. The last Google update was 86 days, longest has been 111. That could lead to 1200 or more links between updates. What will Google think about all these links at once? They’ll love it! Content, quality, one way links. I also promoted my blogs and my website in some of my articles. This way, they too have their own PR generating effect. They also link to my site and my site to them. This, in turn, increased PR to them as well. At time of this article and most recent Google update, one of my blogs went from 0 to 3 and other 0 to 4 all in same update.

These tips should help you increase your page rank. The hardest part will be creating content related to your field and finding sites that will post your work. You can always hire writers and/or article submission services. Here's to next Google update. Cheers!

It's not that useful to be ranked #1 for a keyword that only gets 5 searches a month. Similiarly, it is very hard to achieve high rankings for high traffic keyphrases because there is going to be a lot of competition.

Trim your keyword phrase list down to 50-100 entries and get ready for step 3.

3. Analyze Competitor's Backlinks

While I will walk you through how to do all of required analysis tasks using free tools I highly recommend investment in some form of SEO software or service. The tasks you will have to perform today can be time consuming and a little monotonous so help of an outside resource may prove invaluable to you.

The purpose of this analysis is to find potential link partners (to be used in a later lesson), and to trim our "master keyword list" down to our 15-20 keywords that we want to get high rankings for.

Take each of 50-100 keyphrases in your master keyword list and perform a search on google.com for each term.

We are only going to be interested in "top 10" results for each keyword phrase since our goal is to get listed on first page of results for our target keywords.

Traffic to your site will drop dramatically if your listing does not appear on first page of search engine results.

Our goal from this analysis is to find out how "established" your competition is. This can be accomplished by analyzing number of websites that link to your competitor's website.

To find number of incoming links for any website perform following search from yahoo.com (Please note I have chosen Yahoo because Google no longer reports accurate back link results).

http://www.yahoo.com

linkdomain:www.competitordomain.com

Note: you could use http://www.uptimebot.com for a more comprehensive listing which includes results from all major search engines.

This will tell you how many websites link to domain "competitordomain.com". Search engine's use this "link popularity" number to gauge how important a website is. A site with a lot of links to it must be an information hub and therefore very important.

Perform this linkdomain command for all of "top 10" competitors you have identified for each your chosen keyword phrases in your master keyword list.

If you find that sites in search results have several 1000 backlinks to them you will know right away that you are going to have a hard time getting a high ranking for that keyword since a large number of links suggests that site is already well established.

Make 10 columns in your master keyword list for each keyword that you analyze indicating what number of backlinks are for each of top 10 search results.

Also copy any URL's that offer services that would be complimentary (not a competitor) for what you will be promoting on your website into your keyword list as well.

We will use this information in a future lesson to help boost your seach engine positioning by requesting to trade links with these complimentary sites.

Simply noting them down in your keyword list will be sufficient for our purposes today.

4. Refine Your Keyword List Part 2

Based on your backlink analysis trim your keyword list down to 15-20 keywords you think you will be able to compete for. If there are already a number of established "hubs" for a particular keyword you may have to drop it from your list.

Using these tips you should now be able to tell which market's you will be able to compete in and which one's already have too many established information hubs to make it worth your while. You will also have a list of "complimentary" websites that we will be requesting links from in a future lesson to help boost our own "link popularity".

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Michael Lawrence is the webmaster for Cobrasurf.com