In the ongoing effort to gain maximum page rank, analysis of all available information to determine the future steps to be taken. But is anyone analyzing their competitors efforts? Link quantity & quality, anchor text & relevance are the four components of link popularity with anchor text and location are the two biggest factors. Google has acknowledged as much.
Link building campaign professionals state that if your competitors are ranking well on a certain phrase, you should look to the anchor text in their back links and see if the phrase is listed, if the links sitting on topically relevant pages are indexed and are those anchors sitting in content areas.
I will admit that this is a relatively new concept to me and I was wondering if anyone is doing this kind of analysis and if so what kind of results are you seeing.