Site Age -- The age of a site is generally considered to be one of the top five most influential factors in how high a site ranks. While it's something that is out of your control, sometimes you'll see a site from 1999 consistently outranking a better site from 2006 and it's helpful to understand why. You can see the history of a site using a nifty tool called the Wayback Machine. http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Y! Links – The number of back-links the domain has in Yahoo. As you probably already know by now, the quantity and quality of links, pointing to a site, is extremely relevant in determining how high it ranks. Looking at particular links that your competition has, serves as one of the best ways to learn how they market their site. It is also one of the best ways to brainstorm potential link-building ideas for your site. For example, if your competitors products are all reviewed on a popular blog in your industry, there's a good chance that same blog would want to review your products, giving you free publicity and quality links.

Pages Indexed -- This refers to the number of pages listed in a search engines index, (also referred to as cached pages). Sites that rank high are generally easy for Google, Yahoo, and MSN to spider and thus, have nearly all of their pages included in their indexes. You can check how many pages are indexed by typing in site:www.yoursite.com or by using a tool like the Indexed Pages Tool, on SEOmoz.org. Using sitemaps is a great way to ensure that every page on your site is indexed properly. http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/indexed

Last Indexed --This is the date of the last time Google visited the home page of the site. Ideally, your site is indexed every single day, but it usually depends on how frequently you update your content. If you update content regularly, you should be being indexed at least once per week. You can find this date by clicking the "Cached" link, next to any Google search result.

Home Page PR -- This refers to Google Page Rank. A 0-10 score that Google gives to assess the value of a web page, that is primarily determined by the quality and quantity of incoming links. This is a quick and dirty way to see how popular a page is. Since, this a universal metric that all webmasters can quickly check, it's often misused to assume how much traffic a site gets or how high it ranks -- neither of which, correlates very well with PR. For our purposes though, it's a nice barometer to look at. It can be checked using the Google Toolbar or a site like PRChecker. http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/toolbar/FT3/intl/en/index.html or http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Strongest Pages -- SEOmoz has a great strongest pages tool that will list off the most important pages on a domain, based on number of links pointing to it and its current rankings. This gives you an idea of what content on their domain is causing the high rankings. Is it popular articles? Is it product pages? Whatever their strongest pages, you should take note and use those pages as guidelines for potential additions and modifications to your site. http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/strongest

SEO 101