Sometimes, (if not most of the time) you want to know exactly what your competitors are doing and how do they excel in doing it right. Today we wanted to share with you a comprehensive list of more than 13 online tools that can help you figure out why some of your competitors are ranking better than you.

You can use these services to benchmark your site performance versus your competitors, where You can analyze your competitor’s in-links, and assess your goals before starting any campaign.
Statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, Feed Count, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc.

Checking out your Competition

1- Feed Compare

A free web application that you can use for comparing FeedBurner feeds. You can use Feed Compare to compare your feeds against up to three other feeds. All you have to do is input the name of your feed, and then the name of your competitors feeds. Visit Tool

2- Blog Juice Calculator

It’s a fun tool that allows you to compare your blog to other’s based on: rss subscribers, Alexa, and Technorati rank and links. Visit Tool

3- SEO for Firefox

SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this tool also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data. Visit Tool

4- KeywordSpy

Help you find which keywors your competitrs are using. Increase your Ad Campaign revenue by finding the most profitable keywords. Visit Tool

5- Domain Stats Tool

This tool helps you get all kind of statistics of your competitor’s domains. The statistics include Alexa Taffic Rank, Age of the domains, Yahoo WebRank, Dmoz listings, count of backlinks and number of pages indexed in Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Msn etc. Visit Tool

6- Backtags

Backtags allows users to assess, analyze and rank the popularity of any website on leading social bookmarking sites, identify tags used to describe websites, rank websites according to tag/user popularity and compare and rank competitors. Visit Tool

7- WebSiteGrader

Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. The software will provide a competitive analysis for websites of your competitors. Visit Tool

8- SEO Tool - Rank Checker

To use this tool you enter a URL, Keyword, and what search engine you’d like to search and it will automatically check your rankings and report back. You can use it to check the ranking for your competitors and report back to you. Visit Tool

9- Keyword Difficulty

You can use this tool for multiple domain check-ups for Google Page Rank and the Alexa Ranking. Visit Tool

10- Compete

Compete Site Analytics provide free information to analyze the difference in growth of two or more web sites, including site traffic history and competitive analytics; a list of available promotional codes across thousands of online retailers; and site-specific trust scores based on up-to-the-minute data from Compete and third-party security services. Visit Tool

11- Touch Graph

TouchGraph graphic tools reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites. It gives an interesting view of your site and your competitor’s site relationships. Visit Tool

12- Check Your IndexRank

IndexRank is a 0-10 metric (higher is better) that uses an algorithm based on Google’s indexing data to determine the indexing rate of a website. It measures the rate at which your site is being indexed, which also translates into the rate at which it is growing. Visit Tool

13- Xinu Returns

Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics. Checks PageRank, Backlinks, Indexed Pages, Rankings and more. Visit Tool

14- SeoDigger

You can use this tool to analyze your competitor keywords and know which can be used to find a given domain in Google or MSN. Visit Tool

Further Online Tools to check

• Quantcast- An open internet ratings service.
• Spider Test- Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases.
• Joost Link Analysis- This Firefox extension gives you a bit more information when opening pages, it gathers the PageRank for the linking page, the anchor text used on the link, and checks whether the link is nofollowed or not.
• Myriad Search- A nice tools that search all 4 major search engines at the same time: Google, yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN.