You don't always have to pay for search engine results to improve how your site ranks.

Ever wonder how or why your competitor gets better search engine rankings than you do? Does he know something you don’t? Well, maybe he actually does…And that’s where I come in. I’m here to unveil the secret tricks of the trade that may be giving your competitor that much-needed edge in search engine rankings and to show you how you can reclaim your position without skipping a beat or spending an arm and a leg. Quite simply, I am going to give you the key to unlocking the secret chest of information that your competition is using to get better rankings.

It is not that difficult. There are two main criteria to getting good rankings:

1. Content (which is king)
2. Linking (which is queen)

Content is King

Content is easily viewable and just as easy to measure. It essentially includes what you see on the site: that is, the text. If your competition has more text than you, consider increasing yours; if he has more keywords, consider increasing yours; if he has bigger headers, consider increasing yours. By all means, I am not saying to make a carbon copy of his site, but do look at the on-site factors that your site may be lacking, then evaluate whether to increase them.

A note of caution: Make sure that any changes you make actually improve the site and increase its value for your customers. In other words, don’t sacrifice quality for quantity unless you believe that the added text actually serves to better the overall look, feel and quality of your site.

Some ideas to increase quality/quantity of content:

• Write a monthly article about your topic
• Write a page about your key phrase, product or service
• If your headers don’t have your key phrase in them, then be sure to add it
• Make sure the titles on all your pages relate to the content of the page
• Write, write, write (and then write some more).

Linking is Queen

Linking requires more research. Look up a competitor's site on Google by typing in: link: http://www.competitorsdomain.com/ into the search box (replace competitorsdomain with the URL of your competitor). The results page that you will see is a list of all the sites that link to your competitor. Go through that list, and for each site, figure out how he got that link. Some links might be paid, some might be link exchanges, some might be directories like dmoz.org or Yahoo! and others might be references or testimonials.

Make a spreadsheet with each site linking to your competition, and jot down how he got the link. Then, for each site that is appropriate, get it to link to you. Remember to stay away from link farms and low quality links. Link farms are sites that have nothing but links. Low quality links are sites with little to no content. These sites will often try to exchange links with you: don’t do it! Only link to a site if it will enhance the experience of your users. 

For more about linking, see Linking is Queen.

Royal Success

Getting links takes time and patience, and writing is not usually done overnight. To top it off, once these projects are done, you then have to wait for the search engines to discover and re-evaluate your site. Both the link campaign and the writing projects should be regular activities, rather than something you do as a one-shot injection. Try to create new pages every month, and to add to your links every month. That way your site will gradually climb to the top.

And who doesn’t want that?

Shawn Campbell is the co-founder and Chief Search Engine Optimizer at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc.

Editors Note: Blogs, which often provide commentary on content found elsewhere on the Web and provide links to it, are important to monitor as well. A fairly new site, Technorati, enables you to type in your company's Web site or product Web site, or that of your competitors, and see in real time what everybody's saying about your or your competitor's site. Not only will this show you who's linking, but also when the links went live.