Last night I took a few minutes to drive down to the banks of the Seneca River near my home in Central New York. Rivers, for me, are a perfect way to relax and clear my head. I leaned against my trusty steed that had taken me through college, across the country, and from opportunity to opportunity and simply thought about where I had come from and where I was going.

In those quiet moments of reflection and pondering I was able to throw away a handful of pestering thoughts from the past and focus again on my goals and desires.

I hope that we all have an opportunity to step back from life, find a nice river, and just think. Too many times in my life, and I am sure in yours, I get so focused on progress and work that I don’t realize I am running in circles. Taking time to regularly think about work and life in general is essential for me to not only stay sane, but make sure I am being efficient and doing what I love and progressing towards my goals.

Let’s take some time this week to step back, be grateful for how far we’ve come and just think about where we are going and where our passion can take us.

If you have ever ran in a competitive race, you have probably also lost a competitive race. I know I have…many, many times. Including a particularly scarring defeat to the girls track squad during a race where they ran on the same track as us, just staggered 30 seconds during a two lap race. But I am not bitter, in fact, one of the most valuable SEO lessons around can come from this humiliating event.

You see, when a competitor beats you in a race, you really can’t see why. You KNOW why they beat you. He/she is faster. But you don’t know WHY they are faster. If you could see the exact training schedule they used, the diet they ate, and their genetic makeup and could somehow mimic each one perfectly, eventually reason states that you would come fairly close to their performance.

One of the great things about SEO is that, unlike running, it is almost completely transparent. Some of the most influential things on search ranking (links, page strength, sales copy, etc) are completely visible to anyone and everyone who feels like looking.

So, let’s say you are ranking #14 for a certain search term. Why not take a look at the Top 3’s “training schedule” and do the same? Especially with links.

Do a search for the backlinks of the top three results for the search term you are trying to rank for and print off each of these lists. Go through the list one by one and see if you can’t get a link added to each page where they managed to get a link added. You won’t get all of them but you will get some. Combine that with the links you get from the other two lists as well as the links you already had, and you are in good shape.

If you know HTML, view the source code of their main landing page and check their keyword density, use of keywords with H1, H2, etc tags, as well as the frequency in ALT and TITLE tags and other locations.

In other words, find out what they are doing to win and follow suit.