But what's your article keyword criteria?

I think that The Annoying Orange, in his post just above, is totally right: the quantity of the competition is completely irrelevant.

Here's a question for you, Sam: would you rather be using as your main keyword something which has 12,000,000 sites listed in Google but all the top 5 sites are PR-0 and PR-1 sites with only a few hundred backlinks each, or something which has only 12,000 sites listed, but all the front page SERP's listings are age-old, high-PR authority sites with thousands of backlinks from other high PR authority sites? Bit of a no-brainer, isn't it?

In terms of importance to you, the quality of your competition is everything; the quantity means nothing at all.

You're only competing with the top 5 sites, aren't you? Who cares if they're the top 5 out of 12,000 or out of 12,000,000?

Think again, then. A lot of the regurgitated stuff in those "guidebooks" and "instruction manuals" and "blueprints" people sell may be wrong.

It's definitely a formula, no doubt about it.

Here's a couple of facts that shed a little more light on things...

> For any given individual search, Google will never return more than 999 results. Sticking with the formula you gave, if the phrase has 9,999 competing pages, 9,000 are automatically irrelevant. At most, you are competing with 999 sites for a spot in the search results.

> Most people won't go past the first page (I've heard 70%, but can't back it up). So, for 70% of your searchers, anything past the top ten is irrelevant. The searcher will change their search and try again, rather than wade through pages of results which, supposedly by definition, get less relevant as you go deeper.

> Even the people like me, who have discovered that the best results can be buried a few pages deep, don't have the patience to go more than 5 or 10 pages deep before changing our search queries.

So your real competition could be anywhere from 10 to 999 results.

Formulas like the one you found do have their uses. The further out you go on the long tail, the more likely they are to give you something you can work with. If I'm looking at some obscure 5 or 6 word phrases, and one has 10,000 results and the other 5,000 with similar search volume, the one with 5,000 is probably going to be easier to nail early.

I like to look at two things:

> How fast do I think I can land on page 2, where I can get a portion of the 30% who do go on?

> How likely am I to crack the top ten with a little time and work?

Ideally, I can get into the top 20 quickly and easily, and the top ten will look doable.