Say you've got a competitor or perhaps competitors that are starting to trump you on the first page where you've been vehemently optimizing your website(s) and building valuable links, and without a seemingly good reason. What is an SEO to do but to start digging? Well, a good SEO digs the basics and an excellent SEO goes much further to understand the demographic, suspected patterns and technical advantages the competitor(s) has/have.

With all of that info available, where does one start?

1.  First, begin by jotting down or comparing which keywords or phrases are being matched by competitors, then see where they rank on the top three engines (as of this writing: Google, Yahoo! and MSN).

2.  Pick the top 3 competitors, whether they are brands competing against you, sites ranking in the positions you are seeking to gain, or unrelated sites.

3.  Scan the homepage, category pages and perhaps some of the specific content pages that are outranking your results to identify best practices and "grade" them against your ow.

4.  Check for siteside and external SEO metrics like:

• Inbound links (Google / Yahoo!)
• Indexed pages
• Elements in play (headers, title tag, meta tags, copy)
• URL naming & internal linking practices
• 508A compliance, alt tag use and HTML code vs. content
• Blog entries
• Current news or PR
• Social network content or links
• Types of sites linking in 

5.  Visit Quantcast.com, Compete.com, Alexa.com and Aboutus.org to identify traffic, demo and ranking metrics to see where the sites fall in comparison to your own.

6.  Conduct a Ben Frankin close / Balance Sheet Close where you take the "pros" and "cons" into a list comparing your site to the three competitors based on the collected intel to see who wins and by how much.

7.  Begin thinking about methods that you've not taken advantage of from the items listed and come up with the top three methods/tactics you need to employ to keep up or exceed competitors.

8.  Pages identified from competitors that do not have merit after these checks deserve more of a deep-dive and will require you to comb through the code on the page(s) to see if suspicious efforts or code is being used, or perhaps a "mistake" in a technical platform is allowing the competitor to gain advantage. Mark observations down for review.

9. Finally, ask SEOs in the community if you are unsure about the code (obscure offender to give benefit of the doubt) to see if the site or page is doing something that can either be:

• Reported to search engines
• Replicated for use as it abides by guidelines and could be useful as an SEO tactic.

At this point, much of the information gathered will lend to more understanding of the playing field and allow you to test our new initiatives or to focus further on what was already part of your plan.

Be sure to be careful in this process not to take everything as employable; do remember that there may be unfair advantages employed by competitors that the search engines will allow (to them), or that a piece of information could be erroneous or even detrimental - so read up or ask about something if possible to avoid being caught up in a blackhat tactic that will get you the opposite of what you are trying to achieve.

Last piece of advice is be persistant. As in any field of professionalism, perseverance will always get the benefit at the end of the day, so don't give up if you want to be great.