My answer may not be popular, but I would recommend dropping the money on and SEOmoz Pro account. Open Site Explorer is a tool from them which I feel is the very best in the industry and will give you exact anchor text for every link. That is just one of the many useful metrics which are easily exported and client ready. For a good free tool check out Link Diagnosis.
I personally use ahrefs.com for tracking each and every competitors in my niche and may be this is the one and only tool available on the net.
If you want to spying on backlink and want to know where it come from then use the free service of backlinkwatch.com they will show you 1000 backlink for free and no other site really show that much backlink free. Another option if you after competitors keyword try to discover their hompages source page. It is simple to do just goto homepage of your competitor and right click then you will show view page source click it notepad will open and you will find their keyword and description everything. Also use Alexa for more details. new site for directory submission http://www.prhz.info/
Ardor Backlink Checker allows you to view a complete linking profile of a website. You'll be able to see every link from TLD and Anchor text. Know exactly what makes the number 1 site number 1!
I would suggest you to first find out keywords for your website before doing any competitor's keywords analysis. First choose/select keywords for your website Than find out your competitors for those keywords (mix them while choosing your competitors dont go for top 3 because it will be quite tough to de-rank them and put your self on their position. Than your competitors backlinks study using above backlinkwatch, opensitexplorer etc tools.
First of all you have find your top 3 or 5 competitor; after that check keyword from source and work on them for getting rank from these keywords. If you want to find the competitor back links you can check from backlinkwatch.com and opensiteexplorer.com website.
Google Keyword does all that. With the exception of that, you need to use Keyword spy to spy on competitive websites which are doing much better than you. You can get good plan on what things to bid on.