As you may already know SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is how your site can be picked up and ranked highly in the search engines, such as Google.

One of the key elements of SEO are links, you want to get links pointing back to your site, however not all links are the same and you want the best sort of links coming back to your site rather than any old rubbish.

The best sorts of links are ones from sites that contain similar content to your own, so if you have a fishing site you would like to see lots of links coming back from other fishing sites, you may be thinking that at this point you know you can not get lots of these links because the companies like yours are your competition and they are not likely to help you get better rankings than them.

This is where planning comes into play, you need to think about what would make a potential rival want to give you a link from his site, what do you have that he values more than a link? If you are thinking at this point that you will link back to him in exchange for his link then you would be wrong, this used to be a trick used to fool the search engines but they are onto that one and the two links would be given a very low score.

Rather than swapping links you could offer the other site an article that would be of interest to their visitors, in this article you could include a link back to your site for more information.

Now you may not be able to do this with your closest rivals but if you can do it with similar but not directly competing sites this is a very good way of getting links, however writing all the articles and contacting all the sites can be a very time consuming process so to ensure it is done effectively and correctly you should use a SEO company to get the most from your linking.

Are your expectations of search engine dominance realistic? People have different feelings and thoughts as to what they need their website to achieve for them, some need it to be found for lots of different phrases that bring in visitors looking for information on a varieties of subjects while others are focused on one term that they are convinced will see the site become a roaring success.

In reality you need to understand that you are not going to be able to compete with the big mortgage companies if you do not have a huge marketing budget to throw at the keywords. Trying to compete for phrases that are unrealistic is the single largest cause of internet business failure other than people not promoting their sites at all.

The other main reason for people not succeeding with their internet business is trying to be all things to all people, if you are trying to be number 1 for 100 different phrases and you are trying to do this all by yourself you are almost guaranteed to fail.

It is better to focus your attentions on a few carefully chosen keywords that you can dominate in the search engines, a professional SEO company will be able to recommend phrases that are related to your business, have a low competition rate and also have people searching for it month after month and this is exactly the sort of phrase you should be competing for.

Do the search engines know what your site is about?

You need to ensure that the search engines are able to read what is on your page, there are a few things that will stop the search engines reading your content, the two main things that cause an issue with search engines not being able to see the text on your pages are frames and Flash elements.

You have probably seen flash elements on websites in the past, they are images that often run like small film or roll through a slide show type presentation that often includes text, unfortunately it treats the text as though it were an image and there for the search engines can not read the content.

Frames allow content from a different place to be included into a page this is often used by sites that do comparisons on prices where they draw in content from databases or for sites that do not want people to have to download the header graphic every time they go to a new page, unfortunately this causes the search engines some problems as what they see are 2 pages one with the navigation and the other with no navigation just content and it confuses them.

To get the most from your website it should conform to the W3C standards.