An essential part of any SEO analysis should include an analysis of the competition. It's important to discover not only how much competition there is for individual keyword phrases but also how the web sites of main competitors fare in the overall landscape. Using Google, Yahoo and Bing themselves are great places to start simple, quick and free research on keywords and competitors. As an example, let's say we want to discover what the overall competition is for the keyword "books"; and, our two main competitors are Amazon and Barnes & Noble. A search for "books" on Google reveals in the upper right-hand corner of the SERP that there are a total of 1,030,000,000 results. This means over 1 billion web pages are competing for the keyword "books". To say that's a lot of competition would be an understatement. Now let's take a look at our main competitors. To discover how many web pages they have indexed for the keyword "books" we type in the queries "site:www.amazon.com/ books" and "site:www.barnesandnoble.com/ books" into the search box respectively. It is important to note here the space between the slash and the term books. Leaving out the space would signify looking for URLs that begin with domain/books. Including the space signifies looking for all web pages of a domain that are indexed for the keyword books. Reviewing the results we discover Amazon has 113 million web pages indexed for the keyword books and Barnes & Noble has 8.79 million pages indexed for the same keyword. If you're planning on building a new site to sell books you have a lot of work ahead of you. Next we want to determine how many incoming links both Amazon and Barnes & Noble each have for the keyword "books". This time we enter the queries "link:www.amazon.com/ books" and "link:www.barnesandnoble.com/ books" into the search box again remembering to leave a space between the slash and books. These separate search queries reveal Amazon receives 73.5 million incoming links related to the keyword books and Barnes & Noble receives just under 1 million incoming links related to the same term. To conclude, whether you are an SEO needing to put together an SEO analysis for a client's site or you are conducting research for your own web site these simple and quick search engine tips can help you discover important information regarding keywords and the competition while preserving your budget.