Competition Questions

[justjo]

Hi everybody!

I'm so lost! I am new to niche marketing and have a site all built but am having trouble with keywords. I have checked my keywords in google and yahoo using the quotes and the numbers are so different! For example this is what I typed into both google and yahoo "power of attorney forms" google says 69,000 and yahoo says 77,500,000 - which one do I believe? When I do allintitle: "power of attorney forms" I get 5510, when I do allinanchor: "power of attorney forms" I get 46,500 and when I do allinurl: "power of attorney forms" I get 3420. Using seoquake I get an average PR of 3.1 when I type "power of attorney forms" into google. There are two sites in the top ten that have 6 yahoo links according to seoquake.

So my questions are:
1. Who do I believe - google or yahoo?
2. How do I determine if the allin title, anchor, and url numbers are good?
3. What's a good PR number that I can easily out rank?
4. If I get 7 inbound links [via article marketing] will I out rank one of the two sites that have only six links?

Sorry for all the questions and thanks for all the help!
Have a great day!

~Jo

[webapex]

Google & Yahoo work from different databases and have different philosophies on what data is to be shared. Google has mentioned there are some 200 secret factors in ranking web sites, so you can't predict it based on isolated factors like article counts.

Niche sites are usually designed to reach page one listing where they can get decent traffic, concentrate on that competition, not the average pr of some huge? sampling.
Most of the SEO thpes are using plogins in the Firefox browser to get more stats, the free SeoQuake plugin gives lots of stats on search results. You are using the google keyword tool as well to gauge kw competition and yahoo site explorer to get backlink info.

[justjo]

I guess I still don't understand how to find a good keyword? I used the google keyword tool to find my keyword for that webpage - I have about a dozen other keywords picked out for other pages but I don't get how to find out which keywords will work best for getting my site in the top rankings - can anyone help me or answer my questions?

Thanks
~Jo

[auradev]

You are going about this the long way. I think what you are trying to figure out is what keywords are search most and which are most competitive?

First, just stop using the yahoo number, 70% of people searching are on Google. Yahoo is a waste of time.

Second, the bigger the number of pages you get, the harder its going to be to rank (in general).

What you need to do is be focusing on phrases with 5 words in them first to learn what works. Like "power of attorney contract sacremento". Then go to 4 word phrases, then 3.

For your questions
1- google
2- you are looking at irrelevant metrics
3- PR and rank in search results are not directly related
4- for the most part the site with the most high pr links wins