SEO Tip #2: Discover What Your Competitors are Doing

It's a fact and one of my Top 10 SEO Tips, that search engines analyze incoming links to your website as part of their ranking criteria. Knowing how many incoming links your competitors have, will give you a fantastic edge. Of course, you still have to discover your competitors before you can analyze them.
Your analysis of competitors should include these extremely important linking criteria (super SEO tips), such as:

• Competitor rank in the search engines
• Quantity AND quality of incoming links (prioritized)
• What keywords are in the title of linking page?
• % of links containing specific keywords in the link text
• The Google PageRank^™ or MozRank of linking pages
• The popularity of the linking domain and the linking page (measured by links & mentions)

Aside from using some of the awesome SEO software mentioned on this website, here are some things I personally do when researching a competitor:

• Click the link to their Site Map page and see what keyword you find in the links
• Get a savvy web person to find and parse their XML Site Map to find keywords in page names
• View the HTML title and meta tags of your top competitors to compile a list of needed content