1) I am working on ranking 12 different websites with keywords in domain names. I did keyword (AdWords Keyword Planner, ubersuggest.org, wordtracker.com, WordStream Keyword Tool) and competition research (Market Samurai) before buying the domains. 2) My prioroty is to rank the websites in Google.co.uk, so I am checking the serps there. I am also targeting other countries (Finland, Irleand, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, among others), but ranking in the UK is the most important thing (most traffic, by far, comes from there). 3) Out of 12 main keywords one ranks as number 5 in Google.co.uk, and another as 252, which is obviously too low etc. For this reason, I am going to work on ranking the number 5 keyword first. 4) I am going to be searching for backlinks, and I found the following tools (I am still looking at them in more detail etc): - MajesticSEO.com - OpenSiteExplorer.org (this is going to be the main one, as I can sign up for a free 30 day trial with a credit card, I am going to do this, so I am going to have a lot of info that is needed etc, at least for the 30 days) - Ahrefs.com - MonitorBacklinks.com (this one seems to be good, and it is free) - RavenTools.com (it looks like there is some info available in free version, including whether a url is follow or nofollow, and citation flow <number predicting how influential a url might be, based on how many sites link to it>) - RankSignals.com (info about follow - nofollow, and Page Rank available) - BacklinkWatch.com - SmallSeoTools.com/backlink-checker/ 5) I have a list of all popular sites that I am competing with, sorted by Alexa rank (from the most popular to the least) As far as I understand, I am going to be searching for the best quality backlinks, and trying to point urls from these places to my sites. I am going to be trying to make them look as natural as possible, work on varying the anchor text etc. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on what I can do at this point, what are the other sources / websites that I can use (to get the best / most recent info about seo etc). Thank you.
Well, I would say also have a look at the WebmeUp tool, its another great tool. Have a look at it before preceding further !
First you have to analyse your website as well as competitor and find out which points you missed on your website. After that check your competitor backlinks and try to get backlinks from where your website competitor get it. Don't forget to add unique content in your website.