What do you do to research the competition? - SEO wise?

[firestarter]

Hi guys,

I have been reading up on SEO for while now and i am jumping on the train to build some mini-sites revolving certain niche topics.
And of course the first thing you do is to check out the results that appear for doing a "insert keyword here" search phrase to see how many results come up for that specific search.

What do you do when checking out the competition? What do you look for what you can improve on to outrank your competition?

Real example:

Results 1 - 10 of about 27,900 for "keyword keyword". (0.12 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 21,600 for inanchor:"keyword keyword". (0.62 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 952 for intitle:"keyword keyword"

Now the inanchor: search is a nice command to see how competitive the keyword(s) is because getting anchor backlinks is a core factor to achieve better SERPs.

And the intitle: search command is interesting to see how well optimized your competitor page titles are in the sense how many sites actually take in account such a important piece of SEO real estate.

When seeing the above real life results what else would you do to find factors you can improve on?
How would you continue to analyze the SERPs further?

Also how do you regard the competition seeing the above results?

What would your strategy be?

A lot of questions for a first time post :=) But i hope to spark an interesting discussion from which we all can learn from.

-Firestarter