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Check out these Link Building tips

Use the Search Results

If you decide that you want to list high for certain phrases or ideas you should search for them in the engine you want to list high in. Whoever is at the top is doing something right. The best form of flattery is emulation.

Accurate Indication of Competition

The shear number of entries for a search result give you no idea how competitive a keyword landscape is. For example I can write the word porn here "porn" and now this would show up as a competing page for porn even though it is in no way optimized.

Using some of the advanced search operators can paint a slightly better picture of how competitive a landscape is. allintitle: will show you pages that has the keywords in the title. allinanchor: will give you an even better idea of what the competition is like by showing what pages have the keywords in the inbound links.

The best way to check competition for competitive terms is to evaluate the links into your competitors websites.

Page Copy Analysis

For competitive terms I do not even worry about page copy analysis. The bulk of Google's ranking algorithm is based upon link analysis. Yahoo! is more focused on page copy, but still uses link analysis in it's algorithm. If you do proper keyword research, make your site / pages search engine friendly, and optimize each page then the keyword density will take care of itself.

Link Analysis

Link analysis is a long and arduous process. Luckily there is link analysis software such as OptiLink to help you analyze links. You also can manually view backlinks using link:www.evilcompetitor.com to see who is linking to them.

PageRank (Google's measure of link popularity) is important for top Google rankings, but the words in the link text are far more important than the PageRank they parse.

Report Spam

Tools such as keyword highlighting (a free feature with the Google Toolbar) make it easy to spot sites using overly aggressive SEO techniques. If you "find spam," make sure you report it to Yahoo! as they actively edit their search results. If you can't beat your competitors it doesn't mean you can't get them de listed :)