Why even search for Keywords?They are all too Competitive!

may be you are searching for "credit cards" "home loans" "debt relief" "how to" or any similar monster keywords?

there is where SEO comes to play.

for every keyword there are mill of competing pages, but for some keywords most are just filling, so you can actually rank pretty fast.

I have a dropshipping store for a niche, and had it on first page for the keyword: "niche store" in 4 days of building it (yes, there is a trick, huge one)

and for those where you can´t rank, you use windows of opportunity, like universal search or web 2.0

I had a youtube video for a local client on first page of goggle in 4 minutes a month ago; not much trick here, just the basics

Sandra

Your thread would have been more meaningful if it said "don't spend too much time on keyword research". I've never wasted too much time on this and I consider myself as pretty successful. Write good content and chances are you're pretty much using the popular key phrases anyway. It helps a bit to load some keywords in your subconscious mind beforehand. All it takes is a 5 minute session on Google's highly unreliable keyword suggestion tool.

Very well put, Sandra...

SEO is knowing the basics plus applying some creativity. You may also want to check the actual market close to you (physical location) and/or the one which you know well (according to your profile, your likes and dislikes, etc.). Getting readership and then building a community for your readers, it is one way to go.

Develop your product (onpage SEO and quality content) and promote it (offpage SEO, email marketing, etc.) - but do every aspect while thinking about building good and long relationships.

Hope that you find that which you seek!

Yes, they are competitive. And will get even more competitive since internet grows and grows. That's why you aim for long tail keywords and obscure, smaller niches. Better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish among the sharks in the ocean.

Funny how no one pointed this out yet: It doesn't matter how many millions of competitors you have on the search engines..what matters are just the top 10 positions.

So just go find out more about the top 10 positions (market samurai, perhaps?) and see if your website can be optimized to overtake them!

SEO isn't the only game in town.... find out where your target audience is and interact with them there. If you provide them useful/helpful info, you can drive them back to your blog from forums, youtube, article directories and social networking sites.

John

If it mentioned searching with quotes, it was bad information.

There are still a couple of weirdos who think using quotes is a legitimate method for keyword research but as many of the bight minds above have pointed out... it's just flat out dumb.

Same goes for number of results. Who cares if it's 20 or 20 billion. All that matters is the top 10, the rest are irrelevant to your internet marketing domination.

For you, yep, that is a good starting point. I wouldn't cut yourself off at the top 3-4, look at the entire top 10.

Dig into those sites and see what makes them tick and what has them ranking. Check out their backlinks and copy as many as you can. Duplicate what has made those sites a success.

The only problem with micro niches is in many cases it's beer money which is why the micro niche guys have a lot of sites. For long-tail keywords, you need a lot of content or need to be a keyword stuffing article writing backlinking wizard to get more hits with less content. When you figure this out, shoot me a couple of pointers.

But honestly, quit trying to find a niche and just pick something you enjoy. If you love knitted kitty sweaters, make the best damn knitted kitty sweaters site ever.

Worry about your credit card debt, how to lose weight and forex 5000 sites when you have a better understanding of how to rank sites.

If you are planning to rank sites to rely on search engines for traffic then you need to learn all you can about SEO.

The key ingredient or secret sauce of SEO... backlinks.

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You need to step up your keyword research abilities is what you need to do. If you're basing the level of competition for a keyword based on number of overall search results then you are way off base. I suggest you download the free Traffic Travis tool and start using it to analyze your keywords for you. It takes into consideration how tough the top 20 sites are. For example how many backlinks do they have to the parent site, how many backlinks do they have to the interior page, how well optimized they are and etc, etc etc.

>> YES. I feel like if I could just get this 'keyword thing' down I would be much better off.

You haven't done enough KW research yet. If you've not researched at least a couple of hundred KWs yet, do it now. It'll let you get a feel of Competition and Demand.

> The thing is, When I am searching for a good keyword, I need to know exactly what I 'should' and 'should not' look for in a good keyword.

Competition - what are your chances of getting ranked in the top 10 at the very least.

Demand - how many searches per month

Profitability - how profitable is the KW. All your effort will come to waste if at the end of the day, you start getting traffic, getting ranked, and find that you're making just a pittance from it.

>When I do my searches, do I use a "Broad", "Exact", or "Phrase" match?

When I do competition search, I use broad. ie no quotes.

When I do search count, I use exact.

>What search and competition numbers should I be looking for and be concerned with? If any.

There's no hard and fast rule. No one knows your SEO skills. Obviously someone new would look for lesser competitive field, whereas someone more experienced would look for more competitive and generally more profitable niches.

> I hear different things from different folks and I know they all can't be right.
Basically, My question is: How do I know if I have a good keyword with a chance of ranking high, or if I have one that would take a "miracle" to rank for?

Whatever you hear, just take it with a pinch of salt, even what I say as well. No one knows with exact certainty the way SE ranks website (except that it needs links, quality links, lots of links and good content).

Whether it's impossible for you to rank for a KW or not will ultimately depends on your skill, time, and budget. It might be difficult for you, it could be easy for someone else. Only your experience will tell you that.

My advise is, don't get too paralysed. Once you have made a decision on the KW, JUST DO IT. Whether it gets ranked or not doesn't matter because you'll learn from this experience.