by Mike Tekula, 7/21/2007

Looking forward from the early stages of web site development and search engine optimization can be a daunting thing. A little research will show you that trusted domain names that have been around for several years will almost always outrank new domains. This fact can cause some distress among webmasters - it can seem that you'll simply never catch up. Combine that with the fact that there is now massive competition in just about niche, and it's almost enough to bury your head in the sand.

But chin up, there is hope.

For starters, take a look at some of the competition in your niche. Take a close look at their source code. Looks sloppy? Table-based layouts, improper markup techniques, title tags that do nothing to target search traffic? Every optimization point that you can find that your competition isn't fully utilizing is another place where you can develop your edge.

That said, there are simply going to be some keywords and search phrases that will be too general or competitive for you to hope to rise above the organic search competition and get to page one of results. There is more search traffic every day and more competition as well. The general keywords return millions of results, and there will always be competitors who have been at the SEO game longer than you, have done more writing, have older domains, more inbound links, etc. That's just the way it is. However, with the increases in competition a natural phenomenon has occurred.

Recognizing this phenomenon is as easy as putting yourself in the place of your target audience or customers. A potential customer visits his or her favorite search engine with the intention of satisfying whatever need it is that your product, service or information targets. There was a day several years ago when they could enter a simple, generic search phrase and get limited results. That day has long gone.

A fact: search users are getting smarter. Just as you have realized your inability to compete effectively for the more general search phrases search users have come to terms with the fact that they'll need to enter more targeted phrases to get the results they're looking for. Maybe they're looking for local services, or they want to weed-out low-quality, cheap-o products from their results. While major search engines strive every day to better their search results search users are creating their own internal filtration systems. Nobody wants to waste his or her own time - if being more specific when searching saves them a few moments of browsing results pages you'd better believe search users are going to do so.