what parameters do you use to assess keyword competition

[arttse]

I personally dont care about number of competing sites. I look at the top 10 sites only and analyse the QUALITY of their backlinks.

[NKelly]

Well look at the top 10 competing sites for your keyword... are they long established sites that you have no chance competing.If you are in it for the long term then there maybe no problem. There are no short term solutions for long term problems you just have to work at it. If you have a good domain name and are prepared to update your site with new relevant content you should be in with a shout.Also have your site optimized for the correct keywords.
Hang in there..believe me it worth in in the long run

[Peter Adamson]

I take both total pages and top 10 into account. If the total pages is in the 100's of 1000's then there are lots of pages to displace, regardless.

Even if there are few competing pages, if the top 5 are wikipedia and fortune 500 it's a non-starter. So I look at both the power of the top 5 or 10 and the total number of competing pages using keyword in quotes, allinurl and allintitle.

[Barry Unruh]

I eliminate phrases with too many competing pages. More than 60,000.

After that, I evaluate the top 10 sites for:
Domain Age
Number of incoming links and quality of links.
Optimization for my phrases.

I also look for evidence for ease of entry. If article directories, web 2.0, or other free content sites are ranking, with reasonably low backlink numbers, I feel very confident I can rank.

[bretski]

Personally, I could care less about competition. If there is a keyword that I wish to rank for then I just work to rank for that keyword.

[spen]

I look at the top 3 sites the PR and backlicking.

[guavasofts]

get select right keywords to promote them for your website and searching best way to keywords is google sarch engine that is provide every keyword ranking top 10 websites and get start from there..

[BabyMama]

Originally Posted by bretski

Personally, I could care less about competition. If there is a keyword that I wish to rank for then I just work to rank for that keyword.

Like this one! Determination is KEY in SEO!

[Casiveo]

I was listening to a podcast of the smart passive income blog by Pat Flynn discussing this topic and he had several rules of thumb of which one was to take the average page rank of the top 10 results and if it exceeds 2.2 then it may not be worth competing for it.

[shakil754]

I basically check the PR to top 5 sites and if the average PR is less than 2 then thats good. I would also check the average backlinks for the first 5 sites and if less than 100 than thats good for me. Finally, I would study the first 5 sites to see if any has backlinks less than 50 - if any than thats godd.

I the above 3 tests pass than I would consider using the keyword

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by shakil754

I basically check the PR to top 5 sites and if the average PR is less than 2 then thats good. I would also check the average backlinks for the first 5 sites and if less than 100 than thats good for me. Finally, I would study the first 5 sites to see if any has backlinks less than 50 - if any than thats godd.

I the above 3 tests pass than I would consider using the keyword

I guess those rules are ok for someone trying to quickly analyze 100 keywords, but I really don't think you are going to eliminate a lot of good ones this way.

The PR should have nothing to do with your decision. Facebook has a PR of 9 or 10, but I bet I can outrank them for "yellow balloons on elephants" and thousands of other keywords. Just because a site or page has PR of 2 or higher, doesn't necessarily mean they are even trying to rank for that keyword.

Same thing with backlinks. A site could have thousands of backlinks, but they are targeting some other anchor text. They also could be really poor quality. Another site might have only 50 backlinks, but the majority might be from PR 4 and PR 5 pages with really low outgoing backlinks. That is going to be much harder to outrank than a site that has 2000 PR 0 backlinks.