Moving on from there we look to the PageRank breakdown of the links.

The higher the numbers of high PageRank links the more difficult the competition is however, once you have isolated which domains the links are coming from it is often simply a matter of visiting the site and establishing the same links to yours either through exchanges, directory listings, or other tactics.

While you are on the sites, assess whether the content is relevant. You will undoubtedly not want to visit each and every page that links to your competitors however if you visit all the top sites (i.e. PageRank 3 or higher) you will get a very solid idea of the relevancy value of the links.

Once we know the value in regards to relevancy of the content we now need to know what they're doing in regards to transferring that relevancy along in the form of their links.

Using a tool such as I suggest below, it is simple to determine exactly what types of links are pointing to your competitors, however it is possible, though much more time-consuming, to do it manually (i.e. you will have to visit every page).

An important factor in SEO and the building of relevancy to your Home Business Start site comes in the form of anchor text. The verbiage used to link to your site, or the alt text in the event the link is an image link, can play an important role.

To illustrate this with a great example; searches on Google for "msn" results in the page www.submit-it.com in position seven. If you view the cache, rather than receiving the highlighted use of the term "msn" you receive the note that, " These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: msn".

The relevancy of the anchor txt in this case is so strong that this page outranks many with "msn" optimized for using onsite factors.

What Do We Know?

So what do we now know about our Home Business Start site competition?
We now know where their links are coming from, the PageRank of those links, the relevancy of the top links, the anchor text and/or alt tags used to link to your competitors' sites, and how many of those are multiple links from the same site.

Basically, combined with the information that was attained in part one of this series in regards to the onsite factors we effectively have a blueprint for what is required to hold a top positions for a specific phrase.

Where Do We Go From Here?

So now you have a blueprint, but what do you do with it? The onsite factors covered in onpage optimization need to be duplicated.
The offsite factors (i.e. incoming links) need to be duplicated however what you also must keep in mind is that you are working to beat someone out.

They in turn will work to take back their position, and there may be others working to do that same that just haven't shown up yet.

Here we follow the 10%-more rule. In regards to onsite factors, all you can do is work with the average keyword densities and make sure your content is well written while maximizing the usage of keyword density and special text to give you the biggest boost possible.

After that the 10% rule comes into effect. Once you know exactly what your main competitors have done in regards to their incoming links, do that but add 10% either in numbers or in value and relevancy.

While this entire process can be very time consuming, the goal here is not to save time, it is to maximize the effectiveness of the SEO performed on your site.

Spending a fraction of the time to produce little or no results is never as desirable as insuring you're doing it right from the beginning and then taking the time to do what's needed, thus increasing your odds of success greatly.