Every day, thousands of people try to develop creative SEO strategies that they believe will lead their websites to that coveted number one position on search engines. It is most likely that you are doing the same. The problem becomes even more frustrating when your website is closed enough in the top position, but not there.

If you are still struggling with this problem, here are four SEO tips that will help you get to that hump and to the top position. If nothing else, it should bring a feeling of great satisfaction. Hopefully, this will also mean that you will use this success to earn more money from home with search engines, using the Internet.

SEO Tip 1 – See what the competition is doing and better SEO strategies

There is a good reason that other websites are ranking higher than you, and probably also make more money to their owners. Chances are, they have adapted your “on-page” SEO techniques to rank better than you. You can quickly find out what they are doing and follow them if you can. Here are some things to see. See which keywords they are using in the title and description of their page. Watch out for meta tags, and how they are being used. Are they using related keywords, fighting for you instead of just one?

Also, look for anchor text. Many webmasters will also hyphen their keywords, or bold them. If you search for an SEO book, you will get a free toolbar that is very useful in destroying web pages. This tool will give you about 30 different pieces of information about a website. A quick example is that I used this tool to learn that I do not have my primary website listed DMOZ.org! I am ashamed to admit it, but it is true. I have since fixed the problem.

SEO Tip 2 – Shoot for double ranking of your keywords

Tip number two is a really smart idea that can put money in the bank. Go for double ranking of your keywords. If you search for your keyword, without quotation marks (“”), you may find that you have at least two pages in the top two or three pages of the SERP (search engine result page). You can use it to your advantage. What you should do is optimize the pages for the same keywords, then place reciprocal links on them.

It is almost like a link wheel creating, with some spokes missing. Search engines will reward you for this, and move your page in the rankings. If you do not have double rankings for similar keywords, you can still get additional search engine love by finding backlinks on pages that are already optimized for your main keyword. Use these SEO tips for best practice by practicing.

SEO Tip 3 – Be very careful with your best backlink sources.

You need to see that you are providing your best links with the keyword that you want to rank. Here is a case in point. I recently had a look at all the traffic received from search engines and other pages. I was very surprised to learn that most of my traffic did not come from Google, although I! No. Instead, that place was reserved for a blog that I can never remember. Somehow I have a link on this, and I get a lot of visitors from that link. I was really surprised. So, now that I know that, I am looking at other blogs that are ranked well, and can be seen as authority sites. Here you have to know where you are getting link juice, so you can consume it.

If you are not sure whether your links are powerful enough to give you an advantage, then use a tool like Inkscape to calculate your MozRank. This will tell you the quality of incoming links, unlike other tools that only focus on the number of links. This information will tell you what to do next. If your competitors have more Moz rank, then you need to improve yours.

If your MozRank is high, but you still can’t rank above them, you probably have issues with page optimization or poor anchor texts. Either way, you’ll know what to do to improve your SEO strategy and move that page above the SERP.

SEO Tip 4 – Make Good Use of Google Webmaster Tools

Deciding to use Google webmaster tools can simply be the best thing to optimize your website. SEO tips are good to know, but better when you actually put them into practice. Google has some great tools that will help you do the following:

A. Make sure you have a sitemap submitted,
B. Find duplicate tags and descriptions and fix them
C. See if search engine spiders are actually looking for your page
D. Find out if your site has 404 pages
E. Tell Google how to index your images as well as pages.

All these SEO tips will be a great addition to any SEO strategy you are currently implementing. Today it is very possible to take these four steps to get your website to the top of SERPs.