When you are about to undergo a search engine optimisation campaign it’s important to gauge a realistic impression of how competitive your rival sites are in relation to your site. There are a number of free tools which allow you to investigate strengths and weaknesses of any site, once these have been identified you will have a clear view of what is needed to over take the competition.

Firstly when using Mozilla Firefox there is thousands of add ons that are built with SEO’s and Web Developers in mind, so if you are still a Internet Explorer user then I strongly recommend switching over.

The best Add ons for judging competitors is Netcraft Toolbar. This gives information such as hosting details, site age and page rank, allowing you to make a quick comparison against your site.

Another great add on is SEO Quake. Type any search query into Google, Yahoo or MSN and the results return with a handy toolbar underneath each listing, giving details similar to that of Netcraft, so you can see the competitiveness of a keyword with great efficiency.

Another tool that you take advantage of is viewing the page source. Here you can see what keywords your competition is targeting, and so the sites ranking highly should be replicated throughout your website.

Search Status is a great add on for Firefox, this tool lets you check keyword density, word count, highlights no-follow links and a whole host of other checks that will let you view how your rivals have structured their content and keywords.

Finally the link checking query is the best way to gain insight into the quality of your rivals link campaign, type link:www.seoconsult.co.uk into both Google and Yahoo and the engine will return with a list and number of inbound links. Target that number for your site and you will get close and potentially better their ranking.