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The Net is full of great information for Webmasters. It seems that no matter what you want to do there's always a tutorial or Webmaster board out there that can show you how to achieve your goals.

And that's not something that I disagree with, there are lots of places out there where you can find nearly all the help you need. But there's one place we should be looking that most of us don't even think about.

Everyone's situation is different and quite often it's hard for tutorials and Webmaster boards to be able to tailor the information they provide to your individual needs. But there's one place you can look where the information you might find will suit your exact needs.

It's the one place that we all need to look when we are trying to overcome our competitors ... but it's not the same place for everyone. It's not even the same place every time we need to find the answers to our problems and today that place may be quite different from the place I looked yesterday.

Where is that place? It's not hard to find ... in fact I'm sure you've already looked there but probably haven't looked deep enough to find the information that you need. That place that you need to look ... that place that will provide the answers you need ... is your competitor's website.

Yep it's right there where you have probably looked a dozen or more times but the answers don't just sit there on the surface, most times you have to do some serious digging to find the answers that you want.

Instead of just looking at the web page and maybe even viewing the source code you have to go much deeper than that. You have to start looking at where they appear on Google, you have to start analyzing their back links, you have to start looking at the words they've used on their website and even the words that are used on the sites that link to them.

It's your competitors who have so much to teach you if you want to know why they succeed and you don't but how do you know who your competitors are?

Well that really is the simple part; anyone who ranks above you in the search engines for search terms that are important to you is your competitor. They're the people that you need to 'ask' for advice and, if you ask the right way, they're the people who are going to tell you all you need to know whether they want to or not.

Of course you're not going to fire up your email program or your instant messaging program and shoot them a whole bunch of questions. This is a competitive business and no one is going to give away the recipe for the secret sauce that gets them top positions in any of the search engines but that doesn't mean that they're not going to provide the answers for you.

If you want those answers then you need to go digging for them. You need to ask questions of the websites that are beating your in the search engines. You need to have a look at the whois information; you need to know what the IP address is for those sites and you need to know how many sites are sitting on those IP addresses.

When you have the answers to those questions then it's time to look at the backlinks to those sites and start asking those questions that I mentioned a moment ago.

In lots of ways it's rather sad that more people aren't asking those questions because they're easy to ask. Sure we can't ask the site owners for direct answers but then when you question the website you're always going to get the plain unvarnished facts and that's a whole lot better than having to wade through a heap of horse manure.

I've already mentioned ways to ask some of the questions but there are others that are best asked by using some special tools and fortunately for you most of those tools are free.

Some time back I mentioned a link surveying tool that wasn't free. It was called LinkSurvey and, at the time, I thought that it was pretty good. Now though I've found one that's even better and this one is free. It's called Tattler and it really does perform much better than LinkSurvey.

Tattler will tell you all about the backlinks to any site on the web. Aaron Wall also recommends Backlink Analyzer - another freebie - but I haven't had time to play with that one just yet.

Do a search on webguerilla.com and you should find the link to download Tattler and do a search on seobook.com and you'll find the link to download Backlink Analyzer.

SEO for Firefox is another invaluable tool that can give you a lot of very helpful information about your competitor's site. Of course if you don't use Firefox then you're out of luck with that tool but perhaps it might be worth downloading Firefox just so you can have access to it.

When you have those tools and start asking the right questions of your competitor's site(s) you'll soon find that you get the answers that you really need to get those search engine rankings that you crave.