The problem that so many people today have and you may be one of them, is that they completely fail to comprehend the level of competition that they are up against online. Sure they have a good product or service that has passed the test marketing tests locally, but then they find that they can't give it away online.

But wait a minute! Aren't there millions, if not billions of potential customers and clients on the net? You bet there are but there's also some pretty heavy competition too. This means that unless you have some new patented invention that absolutely no one else has, you just might have hundreds of thousands of people that you have to beat out.

The good news is that most of your competition is patient. For they know that if you just give something enough time it will work. While this may work in a standard community based business, it will get them nowhere online. There are just too many people and the rules aren't set up that way.

This leaves the door wide open for you if you're willing to invest some of your time and resources into Search Engine optimization. Also if you're willing to roll up your sleeves and do a lot of the work yourself, it need not be expensive at all. The first thing on your agenda though should be to learn as many SEO techniques that you can.

1. Get listed in the major directories with high trust: DMOZ, Yahoo, and others. 2. Submit articles to article directories like ezinearticles for backlinks.

3. Write guest posts for blogs in your niche in exchange for links. Free content in exchange for links.

4. Comment on other blogs for traffic and backlinks. Blog commenting. 5. When you submit new articles to your website, make sure they are submitted to the best social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, and Newsvine.

6. Submit articles to web 2.0 content sites such as Squidoo and Hubpages for easy links to your website. I've done this a lot and have seen significant increases in Search Engine Rankings.

7. Participate in discussion groups and forums related to your niche. Often time’s forums will allow signature links where you can place your website for easy backlinks with every forum post you make.

8. Link baiting is a big topic for SEO because of just how powerful it is in building hundreds of backlinks to your site. This means huge increases in your Search Engine rankings. An easy way to link bait is by developing a website widget and promoting it via social methods. When websites use your widget you can add a little link to it - if 100 websites use your widget that's 100 links.

9. Avoid any kind of black hat off-page SEO: links farms, spamming, etc... A lot of people use these kinds of techniques to improve their rankings but it only ends up doing serious damage to their website's trust and rankings. 10. Does your website have an RSS feed? Get that submitted to all the big RSS directories that will then syndicate your content and link back to your content.

Chris Tyrrell writes for Studio-40, a web design and search engine optimisation company in the UK. Visit the website to find out more.