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The struggle to achieve prominent placement on the major search engines can be an overwhelming task, and even seasoned SEO professionals can sometimes run into a brick wall when it comes to pushing past competitors in the race for top 10 on the SERPs.

Gaining top placement once your blog has been deployed isn’t as hard or complicated as many SEO professionals would like you to think, and as long as you have applied the common SEO best practices in the building of your site everything else is daily maintenance. If you’re unsure on whether your site meets the basics, then it may be a good idea to do a little research on the subject. Keep in mind that while there are literally thousands of websites with information on the subject of Search Engine Optimization, your time will be better spent in comparing the common list of things you should not do when applying SEO standards to your site. Once you are confident that your site is ready, your next steps will be defining your game plan and putting your plan into action.

There are 4 things that must be part of your plan of action; consistency, fresh content, uniqueness, and promotion.

Consistency is a key factor in building a reputation for your site. Even if your site is only 1 day old and doesn’t have any real readers, creating and managing your site with a publishing schedule or calendar will give your site a professional appearance when it begins to build traffic from readers. Your publishing schedule should be based on a set time line of research, writing and publishing. Create a working schedule and stick to it. To make things easy come up with some relevant topics and start from there; use project or task calendar to track your progress and make notes for all of your current and future articles.

The continual building of fresh content for your site will separate it from the competition by offering more useful information for potential readers to choose from. Write about what you know. Your experience and knowledge on a topic or subject will inject authority in your content and help make your site and articles stand out. The amount of relevant content that is published, and indexed on the major search engines will make your site stand out because each article will be listed in SERPs as an individual listing or sub-listing based on its keywords or topic. All of your articles you use catchy keyword based titles, and the first paragraph in your article should  include that keyword or phrase. Best practices recommend a keywords density of 5%, and your article should be written to appeal to human readers not the search engine robots. Many writers pound keywords into their articles in an effort to make them seem more relevant to the search engines and forget that how their human readers will find them useful. By balancing both keyword density and human readability you are actually providing well rounded content that will be viewed as relevant to both the search engines and potential readers.

In order to make your site continue to stand out on the SERPs your site needs uniqueness. Don’t confuse this with just site design or layout. The uniqueness that will capture interest is how your content is useful to its potential readers, and how this content (or article) is presented. Providing your readers with valuable resources and links within your articles or content is one sure way to build uniqueness for your site. Look at your site from your potential readers point of view and always consider their needs. You should never use a "Cut & Paste" approach to writing content for your site. There are many sites that merely copy content from other sites without publishing any original content. Readers and the search engines will spot this right away and then your site is just another "filler" site on the Internet. Developing original relevant content can be time consuming and tedious if writing does not come easy to you, if this is the case you may want to consider hiring a writer to develop articles for you. There are many low cost alternatives; look for college students who are journalism or creative writing majors or investigate online outsourcing site, or involve family and friends who have experience in writing.

Gaining prominent exposure on the major search engines is almost a Catch 22 endeavor; it takes exposure to get rankings, and it takes rankings to get exposure… and on and on it goes. If no one knows about your website, then it is almost like it doesn’t even exists! One of the easiest things you can do in gaining exposure to your site is by posting comments on related blogs and forums. There are many popular sites that allow links or trackbacks when posting replies or comments. Make your comments useful to both the readers of the site and its author by providing a personal view or additional information on the topic and include a link to other valuable resources and information that are relevant, and above all don’t make multiple comments about the same topic unless there are replies to the original comment, and never spam when making comments that is the easiest way to get banned from the site and give your site a negative reputation. Another useful technique is to download free e-books and offer them via a download from your site. Make sure that you do not violate any copyright or download laws that may be associated with them. There are many sites that offer free e-book that you may download and offer to your readers. Write a shout summary about each e-book with a link to download it. Another useful angle on this would to build a newsletter and offer the e-books in exchange for joining your newsletter.

Once you begin remember to always be consistent, creative, relevant, and useful. Keep a steady flow of content on your site, and watch your top competitors for changes that may affect your site, and focus on keeping your site unique. Don’t be afraid to try new things and if you find that they don’t work, just move on with what is working and soon you will see the rewards for your efforts in the form of listings on the search engines.

Tags: seo techniques, how to get top search engine rankings, seo for beginners, seo tips and tricks, blog promotion tips, blog writing information, seo tips for bloggers