There are lots of SEO Tools out there to help you gain perspective of your website from a search engine’s point of view. Perhaps the most fun and intriguing are those that allow you to learn more about your competitor’s SEO strategy.

Get ready to spend a few hours going down this rabbit hole… here are 5 of our top picks for tools that reveal SEO insight on your competitors:

Spy Fu:

Find out who’s paying what for online advertising among your competitors. Spy Fu is the follow up to Googspy.com and offers tons of features. Because SpyFu is currently in Beta, some of the data may be a few months behind, but incredibly insightful nonetheless.

Cost: Free

Niche Watch

Before you go spying on your competition, you have to know who they are. Niche Watch gives you a quick overview of the top 20 sites you must compete with to take the top spots. You’ll also get an overview for each competitor about of the number of backlinks to the page, backlinks to the domain, on-page keyword count, number of pages indexed in Google, and more.

Cost: Free

SEO SpyGlass

Shows you at a glance all the techniques your competitors are using to gain a foothold in the search engine rakings. By analyzing their tactics, you can formulate an optimization strategy that’s a step ahead.

Cost: $87 for a professional license

NeboWeb Search Engine ScoreCard

This nifty little tool allows you to size yourself up next to your competitors. Compare page rank, inbound links, on-page optimization factors, and ranking position for keywords in Yahoo, Google, MSN, and AOL. This tool doesn’t offer too much information you can take action on, but shows how you stack up to the competition.

Cost: Free

The Way Back Machine

There is something very rewarding about looking back on your competitors websites over the years. You’ll see how their websites have changed and gain insight about how their strategy has changed over the years as well.

Cost: Free

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If you’re working with Google Adwords, you can use Google’s advertising materials to promote your own services like PPC campaign management. Instead of simply linking to Google Adwords, you can cite their success stories on your site. It’ll help your visitors better capture the value and benefits.

You can touch on every case highlighting the strengths of PPC over other online advertising alternatives. Give examples of successful PPC programs from as many different industries as possible so more of your audience can relate to their field of business. Of course, you must prove that your company is worhty of managing their PPC campaigns.

Besides telling the success stories, you can also talk about tips for successul PPC which is all available on Google Adwords site. As a smart marketer you can work in tandem with Google in a joint effort to promote PPC which by all means is beneficial to Google and your company.

This is also true with Yahoo! Search Marketing (formely Overture), Amazon PPC (Clickriver Ads), and MSN AdCenter. This is definetinely will save you lots of time searching and researching information on PPC management online. You’ll also get the most important key points right up front.

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To execute a highly successful pay-per-click advertising campaign, it’s essential to carefully scrutinize the pages your visitors land on after clicking your PPC ad. Beginners to PPC normally set their product or category pages as their landing pages—but these pages aren’t specifically designed to cater to the users that come from specific ads.

The key with PPC is to make landing pages absolutely laser targeted based on the ad that enticed them to click.

That means that the best landing pages aren’t entry pages either. If you want to entice and convert a visitor who’s looking for a BMX bike, you must not bother him with other options for bikes. You’ll want to send that user straight to the BMX bikes—or even to the exact model if it was used in the keyword search. In the world of the internet where you have only seconds to capture a user’s attention, ensuring that the first thing they see is laser-targeted to their desires is critical.

Using homepages as landing pages has also proven to be ineffective for in most cases. The exception is when you are bidding on keywords that encompass a broad range of goods and there’s nothing specific that users coming with such keywords would like to buy.

When doing online paid advertising your goal to get instant exposure and increase revenue. To accomplish this, you’ll need to constantly research industry keywords and tweak your landing pages accordingly until you reach the optimal conversion rate. Once your conversion rate is healthy, you can then increase your bid amount so that your contextual ads appear more frequently on keywords you are targeting.

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The online advertising company Quigo is stealing away big customers from Google and Yahoo. Well, that’s a bold statement to make and it may seem a little exaggerated, but in essence Quigo exemplifies that smaller advertisers can also have a fair share of the contextual ads marketplace.

Quigo’s contextual online ads have been a success because they offer what Google and Yahoo don’t. For example, let’s say that you sign up for Google Adwords. Do you know where your ads will be displayed? Will they appear on highly visited websites or on some unknown blogger’s website? You won’t even see reports that show which websites your ads were running on.

In fact, there’s no control or transparency whatsoever. The good thing is that you’ll pay only when some one clicks that ad. One click, however, might cost you five bucks or more if it’s one of your high demand keywords. But what good does the 5 buck click bring if it originated from the website that’s unlikely to drive in your prospects? We can’t blindly rely on Google Bots reading the content with 100 percent accuracy and relevancy. Well, at lease I don’t

In contrast, Quigo gives customers what they need most - control and transparency. You’re in control of your advertising project because you choose to place your ads where you deem them necessary. Major players such as ESPN.com, FoxNews.com and Cox Newspapers’ 17 realized the advantage of opaque business and turned away from Google and Yahoo.

Those are some mighty big players for Google and Yahoo to lose—and we all know that these players don’t like to lose. Have the big guys already pegged this as a losing business model, or do you think Quigo will be the next company to be assimilated?

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Amazon is running tests on the beta version of its PPC advertising program Clickriver Ads, an advertising service that allows businesses to place sponsored links within the Amazon site. Clickriver Ads was created by A9.com®, a search technologies company based in Palo Alto, California. A9.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

After reading several blog posts and forum discussions, I have found that people are generally happy to see a new player in the PPC marketplace. Some view the advent of Amazon PPC as a new opportunity. They’re hoping that their PPC traffic will convert at a higher rate than with Google or Yahoo PPC because people who log on to Amazon are more likely in the mindset to buy compared with search engines in general. Others are saying that’s its good to have a new player because greater competition means better service for advertisers. Says one person, “every competitor nipping at Google’s heels helps.” That is of course, if Amazon can pose any real threat to search giants like Google.

Though Amazon PPC is still in beta, people are reporting many problems with registration approval. The service is still limited to the U.S. customers only, so the rest of the world will have to wait as the US works out the bugs.

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