You can find lots of cool tools on the web now, which will help you determine your ranking and your current status as far as SEO goes. Some tools will show you where your site is lacking as compared with the top 10 for the keyword you are trying to rank for – and others will actually copy most of this data from the best sites, and put it straight into your website. Of course, this is not a hard and fast rule. You cannot just copy what your competitors are doing and hope to rank within a few weeks – taking over from your top competitor on the first page. It is of course a science, and as such has much more variables to consider.

An SEO checker like Traffic Travis for example will check the top ten for a keyword, and also return many pieces of data that can help you check your competition (and also your own site). You can see how many backlinks are going to the page, to the site, and also what pagerank the site is for a keyword. You can see things such as outbound links and whole hosts of other data which will help you determine what you are up against whilst trying to rank.

Once you have gathered your data from checkers such as Traffic Travis (or Market Samurai, which has a free tool built in), you can then build a campaign around your keywords. Do not just copy what the other guys are doing though. The idea is to outrank them. So you will need lots of unique content, more backlinks, better authority backlinks, and of course a good pagerank. All this takes time and lots of effort – and the ones who shortcut these procedures often find that even with the best SEO checker – their work was totally in vain when Google does not rank them.

Resources:
www.traffictravis.com

www.marketsamurai.com