Here are some basic strategies so you have the right seo mindset. It will help you solve some headaches, answer some of your questions and reveal to you some insider knowledge of what you should be doing and thinking while doing SEO services.
Do not worry about your competitors.

You do not want to treat them as kings or enemies. If you just started doing search engine optimization, then your goal is to keep improving and learning new things. This is all about learning, it does not happen by luck.

Your competitors are in the number one position, because they merit it. Focus on what you are doing. If something is not working, then treat it as a learning experience and move on. Do not get stuck, this is like a game. The best players get on top, if you are new you get on top once you become a better player.

You can only get better in this game. The only way to loose is if you give up.
So here is now what you can start doing to move on. You do not have to get things perfect, remember like anything else you have to learn first, then become better.

Give your visitors more value they your competitors.

When you are adding value, you are giving what search engine are looking for. So how can you help your visitors, what do they want that you can give them? Doing this you can accelerate your website growth, get more visitors and more referrals.

Get more backlinks then they have.

This is a bit basic, but it works. If you have more backlinks then they have, chances are you are going to outrank them, sooner or later. So check out how many backlinks they have, from where they got the backlinks and always aim at doing better than what they are doing.

Setup the obvious things properly.

You absolutely need content on your website, either articles, or automatically created content by creating a forum or message board.

It is not enough to just write a bunch of articles or worse copy them from somewhere else. The articles need to be unique. Remember if you grab an article from somewhere else, you have to link to the source. Outbound links, when linking to other websites, will not effect your rankings positively. That is why it is better to create your own content. You avoid linking to other websites.

Likewise, if you create a forum, add the nofollow tag on the useless links. Put a link to your homepage from the forum and link to it from your sitemap or some other webpage. That is how to do it right. You want the forum posts to get indexed, without loosing pagerank.

Small things can make a big difference. Being a bit more careful in what you do will bring better results. You will enjoy more money, freedom and more fun. Books, courses, articles and other search engine optimization material does help you and is required in order for you to improve in this game. Do not just put up a website and wait for it to be indexed.

With the software that is available now, you can design your Web page and have it up and viewable in half an hour. And with these tools, why would you need to run an HTML validator on your HTML to find errors?

Well, you don't have to, but if you want your pages to stay viewable through future versions of HTML, or you want newer browsers to be able to display it correctly, then writing valid HTML is the place to start. As browsers evolve, they come closer and closer to supporting the standard HTML as written by the W3C. Even if they don't fully support the most recent version of HTML, the browser builders go in and make sure that they are compliant with older versions of the standard.

If you are writing non-standard HTML, there is a chance that as browsers evolve, they will no longer support your Web pages. A good example of this is a trick that some Web developers used with an older version of Netscape. If you included multiple body tags with different colors, Netscape would load them all in in succession creating a fade-in or flicker effect as the page loaded. This trick no longer works, as it relied on an incompatibility of the browser. Table that is strung out in a long line is much lighter than one formatted with a new line every tr and td.

Many authoring tools limit line length to 60 characters or so by default, a browser will accept 255 character lines (in fact they like long lines), some email programs stop at 200. I try and keep it readable in a large monitor, and return important items. Even going from 60 characters to 120 per line can save several k on a page, it’s always good for seo engine optimization.

There are also automated software which provide seo service that some web marketers use to try and generate links for their sites. Most work the same way. You do a search at a search engine for a certain term, and the software program will visit each site in the search results, combing the HTML looking for email addresses. Once found, these programs then send an email of your creation to every site it has found an address for and asks for a link.