You may have an excellent website that is full of great content and well optimised for search engines with keywords. However, you may notice that some of your competitors are ranking more highly on the search engine pages than you are and if this is the case, it is important that you find out how your competitors are able to do this.

Google in particular is really only concerned in two things overall. Firstly the sites and pages that link to a particular website and also the words that you use on the website pages. The sites that link into your site need to come from sites that Google trusts and unfortunately Google do not seem to trust new websites, as they appear to only reward websites that have been around for a year or so.

If your website is not ranking well, it may be because it is new, or alternatively it may have links that come only from poor sites, or worse still, sites that Google do not trust.

Find out who owns the websites of your competitors and look at how long they have had their sites. You can do this by going to whois,domaintools.com. Enter the site you are studying and you will be able to see when it was started, together with the name and address of the owner, providing they have not tried to disguise this.

Try to identify the main keywords used by your competitor and the search terms they are using to pass up the Google rankings. Look at each of their main selling pages in turn, but do not bother with the admin pages or contents pages.

Go to the page you have selected and then cut and paste the url into this site – oyoy.eu.google/pr/ This site is very busy, but do keep trying. This site will demonstrate the keywords used on the page and the importance given to them by the owner of the website. It will show you how many times a keyword has been repeated. This will give you a clear idea of the search terms that are being used and perhaps even more importantly, you will then be able to work out the other keywords they are not using which may well be ones you could dominate.

You should also make a study of the inbound links to their site. In this case, I believe that Yahoo is a very much better resource than Google for searching out inbound links. Google only list a few, but with Yahoo you get many more. However, they do not reveal them all – you need a Google sitemap to reveal this and that information will be confidential to the owner of the website.

What you are looking for are sites linking in that have what is called a high PR value and this means that Google trusts them. Anything above PR3 is a trusted website. Try to get these links to these for your own website. Be warned, do not purchase links as you may well be loaded with sites that Google does not like. Many of them could well be "no follow" links (defined on Google). There is no easy way of building links to a website. Most good websites make a practice of systematically adding many links to their website – 1,000 or more inbound links is not an unusual number.