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+1 for Marek's answer.

1. On-Page Report
2. Use Open Site Explorer to check your incoming anchor text
3. Run a full PRO campaign (if you're not PRO, you can sign up for a free trial here)

These 3 should get you started in the right direction.

The first thing I notice is that bcspeakers has many more pages indexed by Google, about 6000 to 700.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww.bcspeakers.com%2F&pws=0&gl=us

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww.psbspeakers.com%2F&pws=0&gl=us

This in itself doesn't begin to explain why one site might rank higher than another, but it illustrates that not all things are equal between these two sites. Link metrics like Domain Authority are great for comparing sites under the theoretical assumption that all other factors are equal. So given two equally optimized sites with identical inbound link metrics, one with a DA of 50 and one with a DA of 40, the DA 50 site will likely rank higher.

But with large complex sites like these, things are never equal. Both sites have different anchor text, the internal link structure varies (I suspect PSB has a better internal link structure) and dozens of other factors.

To get a clearer answer, I'd run both these URLs through the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis Tool, and then run an advanced report (if your a PRO member) The tool will examine on-page factors and might paint a clearer picture.

I thumbed up a lot of answers here, so will just add my 2 cents.

Tools like the On-Page optimization are very good, especially when you are a beginner-intermediate SEO, but by themselves won't earn top rankings.

Consider that most ranking factors happen off the page, including the multitude of ranking signals that come from  inbound links.

We all have "F" pages that rank #1 for high-volume terms, and "As" that don't even rank in the top 50. Are On-page grading tools important? Absolutely. They can uncover serious problems, educate us, and open our eyes to our on-page structure.

However, the "perfectly" optimized page is a bit more nuanced. I highly recommend this WBF by Rand.

Best of Luck with your SEO!

Ah, I get it now. I'm not a math whiz, but the exponential factor is certainly going to throw you for a loop in this calculation. Domain Authority uses an exponential base between 6 and 7. (meaning a DA of 50 is 6-7 times more powerful than a DA of 40) I'm sure there's some way to take that into your calculation, but I went to public school so it's beyond my simple math skills.

But you might be on to something. My estimation is that a site with a DA of 40 is about 30x more powerful than a site with a DA of 23, all other things being equal.

This conversation reminds me of searching out your true competition, and search visibility. If you continue down this path, you may be interested in these topics.

https://seogadget.co.uk/search-engine-visibility/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/defining-your-true-competitors

In general, total links isn't a very useful metric. This is because it can include counts of sitewide links, such as footer and sidebar links, repeated over and over again. In general, these links don't have much value.

The "preferred" link count is the number of linking root domains. According to our ranking factor study, this correlates higher with top rankings than just about any other metric.

Overall, you may simply want to look at DomainAuthority, which takes both MozRank and MozTrust into consideration. It's an even better predictor of ranking strength than # of linking root domains. (about the only thing higher is number of linking root domains with partial match anchor text.)

Does this answer your question? I think using straight DA would give you a better indication of the quality of a site's link profile than other methods.

That's would be an awesome feature. Unfortunately, the only way to get a report like that is if you don't have any competitors chosen in your campaign set up. If you do have competitors in your campaign, there's no way to remove their link data from this report.

If you're interested, you can submit a PRO feature request. Other members vote them up and down and this is how the product team decides what to build.

Regardless, thanks for the heads up and letting us know this is a functionality you'd like to see.

Best of luck with your SEO!

The Google link; command is notoriously inaccurate, to the point of being worthless. Rand wrote a piece on it a couple years back.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-link-command-busting-the-myths

Unfortunately, as for manually checking for backlinks, your options are limited.

The good news is that OSE is getting much quicker at indexing new links. Other good ways of discovering links include checking your referring sites in Google Analytics. I could be wrong, but I believe this is the principal behind Linkstat.com

Moz is releasing a new update to Blogscape soon that should solve some of these problems. Majestic SEO sometimes has good backlink information.

As a predictive metric, both Domain Authority and number of linking root domains are among the highest in terms of predicting a site's ability to rank for a given term, all other things being equal.

But there's a better way to answer the question. If you want to know what it takes to crack the top 5 for a given keyword, run the query through the SEOmoz Keyword Analysis tool. If your a PRO member, be sure to run an Advanced Report. This will give you a good idea why the top 10 are ranking the way they are, and what you have to do to beat them.

Each keyword is different. The reasons one set of results is returned in Google will inevitably vary from the reasons it returns a different set for a different keyword. Sometimes you need social shares, sometimes Domain Authority, sometimes raw links.  Most often, it's a subtle combination of dozens of factors.

Yes and no. The number of outbound links on a page is an important factor, but it can be outweighed by a huge number of other factors, such as the position of the link on a page, how "editorial" it is, and other considerations.

My favorite article on the subject. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links

Even though OSE doesn't report these, they are still important considerations to look at. For the most part, you'll have to use your best human judgement when evaluating link targets and ask questions like:

Am I likely to get a link high on the page?

Is the link likely to last, or get pushed to the archives of another URL?

Will relevant text surrond the link, or will it appear simply as an item in a long list of links?

Etc, etc.

MozRank, PageAuthority, DomainAuthority and MozTrust are all great metrics for determining the value of a link, but they are not the final word. In aggregate, I would say they are more important than looking at the number of outbound links, but in the end each link target must be judged on its own merits.