David Naylor in the UK posted about a question he gets asked regularly: “What can I do to harm my competitors”

As he points out at the end of his thoughts – Done do this!  But rather use the post as a headsup on how you could get burned…

I for one believe in being an ethical SEO consultant and would never recommend anyone to worry about harming a competitor’s site.  For one thing, if it was easy to do (which it isn’t) every major corp and minor one for that matter would be doing so, and soon, the powers that be (read Google) would discover it and put an end to the attacks – and they doing this by turning it around on the attackers.  So, once again, don’t do it.

Rather spend your time studing what your competitors are doing online, and how they are doing it.  Look at Google Places, and check out their reviews and where ‘more about this business’ is coming from (known as citations).

Check out their backlinks using tools like Yahoo Siteexplorer (Oops, sorry that’s not available any more) – try using SEOMoz’s link scape tool. 

And try getting your links on all those places – the sites with better Page Rank and the ones that are closely related to your industry or niche the better.

If you don’t have the time to do all this yourself, consider hiring an SEO company to do the work for you.