Reviewing the website’s of your competitors and other websites that rank highly for your target keywords can yield a considerable amount of value information. Think of it this way, if Google thinks your competitor is doing a good job of providing information about a particular key phrase who are you to argue? You should review each of the top 10 websites for each keyword you want to rank highly for and look for similarities. Specifically you will want to look at the following items:
Page Titles (most important)
Meta Description Tags
Links and Anchor Text
File Names
Body Text
Meta Tags
After reviewing each of these individual items you should begin to see how they are accomplishing their high page rank for that keyword. You can then apply this newfound knowledge to your website. Please note that this only takes into account what SEO consultants refer to as “on page” elements and you will want to look into what other websites have external links to your competitor’s websites.
Google and other major search engines place a lot of importance on back links to your website, so it’s important to see what your competition is up to. By using a tool similar to www.backlinkwatch.com you can see who is linking to your competitor, what anchor text is being used, and the number of outbound links for that website. Naturally you will want back links from these same websites as well as other websites in order to beat out your competition. I also recommend installing the Google Toolbar so you can see the page rank of each website you request a back link from. Normally you will want to request back links from high page rank websites, but even if the website has a low page rank of 1 or 2 you may still want a back link if it ranks high for a keyword you are interested in targeting.