Traffic Travis reporting accuracy, backlink checker and a competition question

Gonna keep this really short.

Does the anchor text function in TT work? My competition has a few great backlinks but none of them are keyword anchor text. Is this right or am I mistaken? Does this also make life easier on me?

I am trying to land an offline client in a relatively low competition keywords. I have been looking at a lot of the websites and it seams that none of them are using modern day SEO tactics... WTF?
Is this normal?

How do I know which ways to link build without overspending and overkilling my competition? I don't want to do to much at once because once my competition sees me outranking them and they hire some SEO guy to fix it I will still have some tricks up my sleeve and BHW of course!

Thanks for the help.

I heard TT was totally biting the big one. Is it back to full strength?


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The new version TT still got some bugs.

But more importantly you need to analyze the data it outputs. The ranking difficulty rating may not be always accurate. Some times you will the first page is dominated by authority sites for a keyword. But if they do not have keyword in title and description, TrafficTravis will tell you that it is relatively easy to rank, which may not be the case.
So look at the data and judge yourself.

Is there a better choice then Traffic Travis? I need the reports. Lately the backlink checker returns 0 on every site.