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The competition would love nothing more than to shove your site so far down in search engine results that a -30 penalty would be an improvement.

If they could get away with it, the entrepreneurs in your niche would do to your website what the Barzinis did to Sonny Corleone at the tollbooth. For those of you unfamiliar with Sonny's fate, this would be a very bad thing.

Aaron Wall at SEO Book suggested a number of ways to keep tabs on the competition. He listed several categories and their corresponding sites that can assist with this task.

Online ranking checkers help show where keywords rank over time. Though helpful, these only check one keyword at a time. Also, there is the issue of getting a list of keywords to check. Site publishers need to do some homework on that before a checker can help.

Various free and for-pay options can help with competitive and keyword research. Competitive research can show the keywords a site ranks for in search, while keyword research tells how valuable a search engine considers a given term.

Wall also suggested looking at the competitor's website and its reach to glean more information. With a variety of resources available, an entrepreneur just needs to invest the time (admittedly a precious resource) into making them work effectively.

UPDATE: The TopRankBlog has results of its reader poll of Best Keyword Research Tools posted now.