Hi,
Yes, Justian is absolutely right, knowing your competitors is fundamental when want to do good SEO! Checking out your competitors‘ backlinks is definelty the best way to start looking for healthy link opportunities. I would go for the LRT’s competitive link detox (CDETOX). The tool checks yours and your competitor’s (up to 9) backlinks and tells you, which ones are healthy ones and which ones are not. You can sort the links by their power and their link risk, so it is a good way to decide on which sites you’d like to build a link. I think knowing if the links are bad or good ones is essential when trying to copy the competitors‘ links, caus in the end it doesn’t help having the same links as your competitors if they are bad ones!
Also the tool calculates your total link risk and your competitors‘ total link risks‘ so it is a good way to see what kind of link risk is normal in the particular niche or you can see if it is likely that some competitors will be punished by a penalty in the near future. This is also good to know when planning your own link building strategy.
Regarding the recommended amount of backlinks created per week I have to say that the most important thing here is that you link growth is steadily and increases slowly! Everything else would look highly unnatural. Of course, some seasonal fluctuations might be normal for a particular industry, e.g. a higher link growth some weeks before christmas and so on …
Hope this helped a bit.
Cheers,
Harry