The fact that Internet Marketing is so competitive is the reason for the massive growth in niche marketing where the competition is less fierce. In such a competitive market and even in the smaller markets you need to adopt a particular strategy to make sure you stand a good chance of getting your message seen at all by interested prospects.

The trick? You must beat your competition at their own game, of course. And the only way to do that is to "know thy enemy".

There are a number of ways to do this and resources to make your job a lot easier. Time is the most valuable commodity you have and if there is a way to save time by investing a little cash then I suggest you do this.

Run a search of your more popular keywords in any search engine. The results will reveal the number of websites targeting your market. Each and everyone of them is your competition. The ones at the top 10 in the first page of the results should be your targets. Your goal is to topple them from their position.

And you WILL be able to accomplish this by first knowing what they're doing right.

Try to visit their website and observe the way of how they do things. How are their keywords positioned? How are their pages designed? How is their content laid out? How is their information presented?

At the top of your browser click "view" then "source" this will show you the inner html workings of the page you are on. Have a look at the alt tags in the page, are they laden with keyword phrases?

What keywords are your competitors targeting in the meta tags?

One of the most important things you need to know about your competition is which, and how many websites are linking to them. I use Brad Callen's SEO Elite to find out this info.

With this info in hand your task then would be to get the same linkbacks and more. It is unlikely that the top rankings in your determined keyword phrase are all linking to the same websites. So take the top 10, find out all their link partners and beat their link popularity by swapping links with a greater number.

Especially target those link partners with high Google ranking. The aforementioned tool will give you all the required info. Google rankings of 0 PR should be ignored.

The golden rule in beating your competition is by copying what works for them and improving on the same.

Retain what works and discard what doesn't.

I hope you found this article helpful.