Competiton Bar in Google Keyword Tool

[Carl Brown]

Does the competition bar serve any purpose for those trying to develop micro-niche sites? Is the only way to check competition by checking the top ten in google as well as the number of results displayed (under 30k is what we are to look for?)

[xiro25]

The competetion bar is just for the adword users when they do PPC. If the bar is high this means that there are alot of ppc users in adwords for that particular keyword.

For competetion all you have to pay attention to is the top ten in google. I recommend getting Traffic Travis and using the free version to analysis the top 20 in google.

you are looking for the following:
-Backlinks to the actual page under - 100
-Page rank for at least 3 in the top ten - zero
-I like to see the age of webpages zero (not that big of a deal)
-See if your competition is targeting the keyword you are in the h1,h2,h3, titlle and url.
-If all of that passes I use backlinkwatch.com and check each website in -the top ten and look at their backlinks and see what anchor they are targeting, Page rank of each link, and see if I can get the same and links or better ones

That is basically my competition analysis in a nutshell.

[Carl Brown]

Thanks. That explains why I have no luck with micro-niche sites. I've been doing everything backwards and only today figured out that low competition on that bar is bad for the site optimizing side. Oh well, live and learn!

Back to the drawing board

[App Developers]

Nice explanation. I do pretty much the same to analyze.