Article marketers is this normal

I personally do not place any limits on amount of searches or how many other sites Google says the phrase is competing with.

If it's a competitive phrase, I enjoy the competition! It's fun to play around with those, actually. In a lot of cases you can get some solid research done with them.

And if it's only searched for twice a month, then in my opinion the chance of one or both of those people buying my product is, without a doubt, worth writing an article optimized for that phrase.

Allen

Hi,

Yeah, I've tried higher search / more competition keyword articles and found that I ranked quite well.

The only problem is that if you don't start backlinking big time, they will fall into the depths of the serps very quickly. Whereas the long-tails have a much higher chance of hanging around the first page or two for longer.

This long tail is actually searched 100 + times a day . Well that is what the software says ... but it also said only 17,500 competitors :-)

I only use the landing page to capture list members . It is a seperate list and the article is less than 5 hours old and already I have over 20 on the list, so it must be getting searched .

Thanks Troy. Glad I could help you! Let us know how it goes.

Allen

Hi Troy,

I have had much success recently by using keywords that get searched on at least 1,000 times a month but have fewer than 20,000 search results with quotes. Of course if I see a keyword that gets far more than 1,000 searches per month and has just over 20,000 I will still go after it.

Then I will deep link my articles by writing more articles and linking to them. The more back links you get to the keyword, the higher they'll rank and the longer they will stay ranked.

Matt

Your suspicion is right to some degree, think of it this way...

"Keyword A" has 20 competing sites. The last in rank, that is number 20, is a PR 5 page with hundred thousand backlinks.

"Keyword B" has 1,000 competing sites. In this case, the page that is ranking number 1 in SERPs is a PR 2 page with some 4 to 5 thousand backlinks.

Which one of the two keywords do you think is harder to rank for the one with high "competition" or the one with low?

Many people (especially IMers) disagree but IMO it is absolutely pointless to look at the number of competing sites when targeting a keyword instead analyzing the weight of top 10 sites individually if you want to rank in top 10 is a better way to go about it (or top 20 if you are trying to get to second page).

First thing you want to know is how does google rank the indexed pages in SERPs. Well, the basic idea is simple, google allots a weight to each page.

Now, Page rank, backlinks, anchor texts, On-page optimization, keyword density etc etc are not the only factors that google uses to calculate weight of a page but in moderate/low competition they are the most important ones (you only need to work on these factors to outrank other sites) and each factor has a different capacity to contribute beyond which, it becomes useless to work on that factor anymore.

It is so because all other ranking factors except Pagerank have a score and beyond that score their ability to add up to your site's ranking in SERPs is inversely proportional with their rate, this is known as the non-pagerank factor threshold. You may have seen pages in SERPs that are ranking high with low pagerank, for example sometimes you do a query in google and you see the site that is ranking #1 has PR3 and the site ranking #2 or #3 has PR4, when this happens it means that the sites are competing below non-pagerank factor threshold.

I hope it helps, its not easy to explain because there are no real values for scores and weight of any non-pagerank factors, it's a hypothetical line but it gives you an idea of fundamentals.