How can I analyze my site, against my competitor's and to see what they are doing right, that I am not. Can anyone give me details or a step by step?
Just use any of the online web tools to see how many backlinks that they have, check on their meta tags and based on the keywords listed there, type those into google to see how they rank. Analyze their content to see what is the keyword distribution like... Basically it's a long process.
The first thing I look at his how many links the competitor has according to Yahoo! I use SEO Books "SEO for firefox" plugin to mkae things quick, you could also use SEO quake. Then I look at what the anchor text is for those links using a tool like backlinks master. Those are the main things I look at for judging a competitor on first glance but I'll also take the domain age, name, the PR of their inbound links and onsite optimisation into account. The question after that is can I match or beat that? And don't worry about the quantity of links putting you off too much, anything below 4,000 is pretty easy with targeted backlinks that contain your keywords in the anchor text. As an example just today I saw a site ranking second with 61 links for a term that had a first result with around 955 links and a 3rd with about 3,000 links... it is possible.
Analize the links of your competition using this free tool that gives a complete info about the backlinks to any site
check google for backlink anyalyzer and put your competitors url and analyze. Then you will see where they have got backlinks from. you too start gainning backlinks from those sites. check (analyzebacklinks.com