I have mentioned before that your main goal should be, to beat your competitors and get first page ranks in the search engine results. Identifying them and reviewing their optimisation strategies from time to time helps you throughout the search engine optimisation process. For this, you need to have an idea who your competitors are. Review their sites and promotion techniques and from time to time this will give you many new ideas and tips of search engine optimisation. These might help you in your online business.

How to Identify your competitors
Use the search engines!! Search with the keywords that you expect surfers to use to locate your web site. The web sites that are ranked in the top positions are the competitors whom you have to beat to reach the top.

How does this help?
This helps when you are trying to build links to your web site. Sometimes, you do not know whom to request a link. Suppose you search with your most desired keyword in a search engine and come across a few sites whose link popularity scores are very high. Find out how they have scored so high in the link analysis system. You can then implement these ideas in your site and improve your ranks. How do you know which site are linking to your competitors' sites? Again, use the search engines. Analyze how and why they are linking to your competitors. You can also incorporate those strategies.

Sometimes you will find that your competitors have a number of informative articles. These are allowed to be republished in their web sites for free if they agree to put a link to their web site with the articles. At other times, you may find that the newsletter of your competitor is the main attraction, and others who do not have a newsletter section love to link to them.

This way you can take ideas from your competition. However, make sure that they are not doing something which can be considered as spam, do not implement it even by mistake. Forget about that competition right then and there, as sooner or later the search engines will detect them and they will be penalized.