I’ve got some good news and some bad news: You can ethically spy on your web competitors. You can find out their number of visitors, the demographics of those visitors, exactly which sites are linking in their site, when they started their site, if they have a good SEO campaign, which keywords they rank well for and even more. You can steal their tricks, learn from their methods, and ultimately overtake them in the quest for search engine domination. The bad news is, they can see all this information on your site as well. Part of having good SEO is knowing how to extract information from competing sites, analyzing it, and using it to climb the rankings. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to have access to this valuable data, its free and available to anyone who wants it. There are a myriad of clever tools to help you extrapolate and analyze your competitors sites quickly and easily.

1. Google Keywords: One of Google’s flagship tools, the keyword generator is officially meant to show you keyword CPC and competition for Adwords, but it can also be used to tell you which keywords your competitors are using to rank well and can give you some great keyword ideas as well. Just enter your competitor’s website into the website feature, and presto, keywords!
2. Yahoo Site Explorer: One of the most common mistakes for people new to SEO is that they use the “link: examplesite.com” feature in Google to check the number of backlinks to their competitors sites. The problem with this is that Google only indexes a fraction of the actual number of backlinks to a site in their search engine. To get a much better idea of the actual number of backlinks to your competitor’s site, it’s better to use Yahoo Site Explorer to show you all of your competitor’s inbound links, which you can then go after yourself.
3. Google PageRank: Google ranks site quality based on a simple 1 through 10 metric called PageRank, with 10 being the best and 1 being the worst. Google and Facebook are two of the only sites with a 10 PR, and a PR of 4 or above is considered a good quality link partner. PR number is based on several factors including number of inbound links, the site age, and the internal link structure. While PR is a very quick way to determine the quality of a site (say to identify potential link partners) it also isn’t the only factor you should focus on. Google only updates this metric every 6 months or so, and some sites that rank well in search results can have only an average page rank and visa versa.
4. Majestic SEO: Majestic SEO is the only free SEO tool I’ve found that shows backlink discovery over time. It can tell you the number of links pointing into a site on a graph over months and even years. This is a good to know, because links can fluctuate, especially when a company hires an SEO firm to “push” for inbound links. They can often acquire vast numbers of links in a short period of time, only to have a lot of them deleted fairly quickly. This tool is great if you want to get a good idea of the average number of backlinks you will have to achieve to overtake your competitors, rather than just the current number linking into their sites.
5. SEO Pluglin: This nifty little plug-in works on Chrome and is the single greatest way to quickly check many quality factors of a site all in one place. It shows the number of pages indexed in all the major US search engines, number of backlinks indexed, PageRank, estimated traffic, number of social bookmarks, domain age, domain location, whether or not the site contains a sitemap and a robot.txt file, and more. Basically, it’s  every factor you would need to look at to determine the SEO of competitors site. This tool is especially useful if you need to check a large number of sites, because there is no need to go to 12+ different places to compile this data, its all generated in a little pop-out window in a matter of seconds when you are on the site.
6. Quantcast: How do you know how much traffic your competitors are getting? What is your market share? Quantcast can give you quick traffic stats as well as age, race, and economic demographics. It can also give you affinity statistics (ie other sites that site visitors are likely to visit). In my experience, Quantcast tends to under-estimate traffic statistics to sites, so for a more accurate picture of traffic, I would suggest Google Ad Planner.
7. Google Ad Planner: While this tool doesn’t collect data on all sites, only the ones that sell adwords advertising, it can be an incredibly precise tool for traffic estimation, affinity, and demographics. While it doesn’t give you as detailed demographic info as Quantcast, it can give you some pretty accurate data about strict site traffic, and can therefore help you extrapolate whether or not your competitors good SEO results in more visitors.
8. Google Trends: Unless you’re an extremely high volume searched website (like 250,000 plus monthly visitors) trends won’t be able to provide much actionable data. However, it is good at showing like competitors that you may not have unearthed before. It also shows you the highest search volumes per keyword by month, so if you’re planning an adverting campaign for a particular product, this tool can show you when the peak search volume is.
9. SEO PowerSuite: This quad set of  Pro-SEO tools are meant for SEO professionals, but the free version is pretty robust and they can help you determine exactly where your site ranks for particular keywords. It also has an excellent backlink checker for Yahoo, and a great website auditor that tells you how to better optimize your site.
10. Site-Psys: Very similar to the SEO Power Suite rank-checker tool, this tool is all online so it doesn’t require a download. If you just have to check the ranking a few keyword ranks quickly, this is a fast and easy solution

No one tool is going to automatically allow you to dominate search engine rankings in your field, but if you use all of these tools in conjunction with each other, you can get a better picture of your competitors. Rather than optimizing in a blind or haphazard way, these tools will allow you to be more analytical and systematic in your approach to SEO. After all, while you should never forget your human audience, SEO is all about optimizing for algorithms. There is absolutely nothing standing the way of your site competing better. It takes time, persistence, and yes, lots of research, but you can do it.

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