You may all ready know that in search engine optimisation and on-line marketing one of the most important things is to to have links pointing back to your site.

These are seen as votes by the search engines and one website should only link to another if the information on that website is going to be of interest or value to the visitor.

As a website owner you want to promote your website and get it found in the search engines so you need to make other website owners aware that you have great content on your site that their visitors will find useful.

So you now have the whole internet to choose from to get links from, the problem is that there are so many websites and you just do not have time to contact them all and tell them about your site, so reducing the number of sites you need to talk to is vital.

The first thing to do is look at relevancy, you can dismiss large numbers of sites as not relevant to the topic you are discussing, the next is quality, would you recommend this site to a friend of yours? If not do not get a link from them.

The links that are going to be of most value when you are working on your search engine optimisation strategy plan are the ones you find relevant and from sites that you would recommend to others.

When it comes to marketing there are very few new ideas and this is the same in internet marketing and website promotion as with any other form of business promotion.

So when you see another website above yours in the rankings what can you do about it?

The first thing is to prepare a Search Engine Optimisation strategy plan and one of the best places to start this is to identify your competitors and see how they are outranking you at the moment, you need to analyse the structure of there site, what keywords have they targeted, how have they used the keywords on the page what links to they have coming back to them and which of these links is producing the most benefit for them.

You then need to prioritise the work that needs doing so you can get the most benefit from it in the shortest time.

The keyword research is the key to this and once you have this solid base you can more forward from there to take advantage of the other things you have learned about your competitors site.

This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.