I often get asked: ?Why does competitor X get such good rankings in Google.? Nine time out of ten it?s because the competitor knows enough about search engine optimisation to: a) Know what keywords people search on; b) Have optimised their pages to include the popular search term in the title tag, H1 tags and page copy; c) Received incoming links from relevant web sites with the search term in the anchor text. Those three factors are the real essence of SEO. If you can get these three things right, over time you will outrank over 99% of your competitors. To work out how your competitors rate in terms of incoming links, there are several online tools available to help. Such a tool is available at seo-forensics.com To use it, just enter the web site address of the site you?re analysing, check the appropriate boxes, and then hit Check. If you see lots and lots of links displayed from sites with PR3 or better pages, and the right anchor text for those links, then this explains why a site ranks so well and what search term it is trying to rank for.