Ability to find good backlinks to your site is very important if you are trying to get your site at the top of search engine results for your targeted keyword. Having a well optimized site is important for good ranking in SEs but backlinks from other sites are even more important. One of the many techniques for finding links is analyzing your competition. How it works? You find your top competitors simply by typing your keyword in search engine (for example Google). Then you need to find all the backlinks that this competitor has and try to get links from same sites to your site too. How you do that? You have several choices. If this third site from which you are trying to get a backlink is directory then you can easily submit your site to the same directory too. If the site is a blog, then you can write a nice contributing comment to some post and submit it with your URL and anchor text. If the site is forum then again you can register there and start posting useful comments with your URL in your signature. If the site is not any of the above mentioned than you can write a polite letter to site owner asking for a link (of course your site has to be worth of linking). You can even offer a backlink or money in return.

That was how you can get links from the same sites which are already linking to your competition, but how can you find those sites? Basically it is very simple. As I mentioned, first you find a top competitor by searching for your keywords in Google. Then you need to go to Yahoo and find his backlinks. You cant do it in Google because Google shows only a small sample of backlinks, not all of them. So you go to Yahoo and type site:competitordomain.com. Somewhere at the top of page you will find link inlinks(somenumber). Click on that and you will be displayed with backlinks to your competitor. A little drawback is that you will be also displayed with some links from the same site (competitors inner pages) not just from other sites. This can be avoided with little bit more intelligent search query. In Yahoo search box type linkdomain:competitordomain.com site:competitordomain. This query should skip all the links coming from the same site.

Basically that is all there is behind usurping your competitors backlinks. You can find as many competitors as you want in Google and then find their backlinks in Yahoo. After that you can start trying to get a link from those sites linking to your competition by following method described in this article. It wont be easy, but search engine optimization (SEO) is just a competition, you always have to do something better than your competition. The more backlinks you find better you will be ranked. Dont forget that for this link building strategy is really important to have a site with valuable content worth of linking. It will be much easier to convince other webmasters to link to you, or to get your directory submissions and blog comments approved if you have something to offer on your site.