One of the first stages of search optimization is understanding your competition, and this involves both on-site and off-site factors. In the world of SEO, your online competition is the top ranking websites for your main search terms.

A starting point for your off-site optimization is to analyse who is linking to the top ranking sites and why. If you type link:www.yoursite.com into Yahoo you will find out how many sites Yahoo has indexed that are linking to your site. You can do the same on Google but Yahoo is more generous with the information about the sites which link to you. You can then get an idea about how important each of these external links is by looking at the Google PageRank of each site. To do this you need to download the Google toolbar form http://toolbar.google.com and enable the Pagerank Display in the toolbar.

I will now look at some of the tools I have used and which will help you gather this information much faster. I have used all of them, some more than others depending on my requirements.

The first is an online tool – LinkDiagnosis.com. Just type in your URL, let it run, and it will return results which show first the pages on your site which have backlinks (external links) and the Google PageRank of the pages linking to you.

If you do this for each of your competitors you can find all their backlinks and if these are relevant your website you can try and ask these sites to link to you also.

Another great tool for analyzing backlinks is Aaron Wall’s Back Link Analyzer. This tool is also free and gives you a huge amount of information on the backlinks. As well as giving you the link text, it also gives you the title, the IP address, number of outbound links, and whether the link is one-way or not.

By using the “keyword summary” tab you can see how often different keywords appear in each of the link text, title, and page text. This is important because the “anchor” text in the links which link to your site tells the search engines something about your site.

This tool is also meant to analyze the page rank of each linking page but I have never been able to get it to do this.

Now a look at the tools you need to pay for. The first tool to look at is PR Prowler. This costs around $97 and is designed specifically for finding backlinks and PageRank. You type in a keyword, choose the search engine and it returns a list of sites ordered by PageRank. For each site it shows you the Google PageRank, the number of outbound links, the number of inbound links, and based on this, the likely PR boost to your site.

Alternatively you can type in the urls of your competitors and ask it to “prowl” the sites linking to your competitors.

The advantage of PR Prowler over BackLink Analyzer is you can choose which google search engine you want to analyze on – which is useful if your site is based outside the US where Google search defaults to the relevant country search engine (e.g. www.google.co.uk).

Other useful things you can do with PR Prowler is set a filter to only return sites which are above a certain PageRank level, or list only those sites which have a contact form – which of course you can then use to contact the site owner to discuss whether there is any potential to request a link.

There are a number of complete SEO software packages which include backlink analysis tools in their SEO toolset. Three of the most popular ones are IBP, WEBCEO and SEO Elite. These packages offer a complete range of SEO tools but I am only going to consider the backlinks modules here.

I use IBP which cost $249, for a lot of my SEO work and it includes a module called Arelis which you can use to analyse backlinks. You can either analyse sites which link to your competitors or you can choose to find blogs or websites related to certain keywords. The program returns a list of sites with the useful information for each link including link text, PageRank, Alexa traffic rank, total links on the page, total outbound links and IP address. It stores this info in a database and allows you to email each sites and ask them to link back to your site if they are relevant.

Arelis also allows you to create your own link directory and list sites which link back to you – however make sure that if you do this you are creating a valuable resource – not just another link directory which does not add value to anyone. A reciprocal (two-way) link is not as valuable as a one-way link from a site linking naturally to your site, especially if these reciprocal links are just part of a link list. As a total SEO package IBP is one of the best available.

WEBCEO costs around $199 and is similar in that it has a “Link partner finder”. You enter the keywords or the urls of your competitors, the program then returns the URLs with all the usual backlink information, and similar to Arelis you can use the software to manage your communications with these sites.

My favourite tool for backlink analysis however, is SEO Elite which costs around $167. You enter your competitor’s url and it returns the PR, Alexa rank, IP address, Page title, anchor text, number of outbound and total links on the page, and the website age. It also shows the summary in a smaller window.

Then when you click on the Analysis view you can see which words are being used in the body, title and link text on that page.

If you are thinking of optimizing your own website and have not chosen any SEO software yet, then I would recommend SEO Elite – but remember that having the seo tools will not automatically guarantee you a top 10 listing. You also need to learn how to use the software and how to interpret the results.

If you run a business then using an SEO company will save you a lot of time and potentially costly mistakes, since they have experience which only comes through working on many different sites.