Aaahhhggg Keyword Research! (I'm So Confused!)

In quotes, "keyword" are for exact number of searches made and allintitle: is simply site with keyword in title of site.

I would say a search in quotes since it returns a phrase match of the keyword or keyword phrase, whereas the allintitle gives you only a return if the keyword is "all in the title"

Hope this helps

Hi.

There are different ways to do a search when you want to determine how many real competitors you are up against for a specific keyword.

Search in "quotes" and search with " allintitle" is two of them.

The endless discussion is not how to do the search, it is more how many competitors is to many.

My advice is not to hang yourself up to much in it.
Use common sense.

First of all, I only investigate "buying keywords" or very specific keywords in the first place.

When I do investigate, I use Firefox with Seoquake plugin.

I do the search as all the searchers does, and I then investigate the 10 first result.

I want to know PR, Backlinks, keyword in the root domain, age on web page, and I also want to see if there are any articles directories or web 2.0 sites (3de part websites) among the 10 result.

I will use that keyword as long as those numbers are low, or if I find 3de part websites in the result.

Hope this helps a little.

- Oddvar.

I typically use allintitle to tell me how many people are focused on the keyword. If their is a lot of allintitle results then that means a lot of people are probably focusing on that keyword which will make it harder to rank for.

Thanks to all who have responded. (My 'Thanks' button is not active yet .) You guys have been a real help!

Neither (if that's all that you look at). These clues are getting more and more unreliable. Look at the backlinks that the top sites have are better clues on the actual competition.

quotes or no quotes... doesn't matter... it's wrong and doesn't mean anything. It's misleading information based on irrelevant results.

Google will only return 1,000 page results for any search query.

Check out page 100 (results 901 - 1000) of your search results to see the bottom feeders.

Results 1 - 10 of about 507,000,000 for keyword is irrelevant.

All this is, no matter how you do your search, is a total number of pages indexed that have your search term located on the page, in the title or wherever but it's not an accurate relection of pages that google feels are relevant for your search term.

For the keyword "keyword" google may have 507,000,000 pages indexed that contain the word 'keyword' somewhere on the page but the truth of the matter is google only finds 852 pages relevant for the search query "keyword". The total number of competing pages you need to be concerned with for the keyword "keyword" is 852, not 507,000,000.

This is the case for any search. If a page is not in the top 1,000 search results then the page is in the supplemental results which means google does not find the page relevant or important enough to be included in the actual search results. Pages in the supplemental results are not competition and are irrelevant.

Also, while google will only return 1,000 max results for any search, generally there are often far less. Many searches will only return a few hundred results.

Looking at something like Results 1 - 10 of about 507,000,000 for keyword is an awful way to judge the competition for a keyword or phrase.

Aside from all of that... all that really matters are the sites sitting on spots #1 - 10. If you can't beat them then it doesn't matter if your competition is 20 or 200,000.

I would suggest going for "keyword".

After that you should see how many pages are competing on your keyword. Then, if there are not so many pages you should see if that keyword is intitle in many pages intitle:"keyword".

After that you may check the PR of the first 4 pages on the actual results and see what's going on. Big pr means it's hard to beat 'em.

Jordon,

The very worst thing that you can do is be overwhelmed by all of this information to the point of not taking action.

Sure, there are dozens of ways to determine how "good" a keyword phrase is. Each marketer has his or her own method and criterias for this.

My suggestion to you is to do a little research on the forum. Keep things simple to start out. Determine your own keyword requirements. Test out the keyword phrases and learn from your own personal experience.

Much Success,

KateD

Of course there are some softwares available for that goal as well, but I won't get into that..

but yeah don't get TOO focused on researching the keyword, I don't have anything useful to add to the already exicting posts but what fellow Warriors have already told you might be, dare I say it, too much for starters...

start with in quotes and allintitle that should be enough for starters, to find a niche in which you can compete and conquer of course! Good luck to ya.

Hi Jordan,

It seems that a lot of warriors here have given you
enough already. So just to further strengthen the
information you have, here is my input regarding
this matter.

You should not only look at one criteria like "Exact" or just in
"All in Title" or only "All in Url" but instead use the criterias in
tandem to gauge or estimate how competitive a niche is.
Use all of them in combination..

Think of the combined information as indicators
for competitiveness. It's like a checklist to signal
a "green light". The lesser these figures are, the
more indicators that there is a possibility for you
to dominate that keyword.

Here is an actual example of a keyword that I
researched about two weeks ago..

Keyword : Toys Boy

Total Monthly Global Search : 450,000
Broad Competition : 83,100,000
Exact Competition : 25,800
All in URL : 2,320
All in Title : 31,800

Though this keyword has millions of broad competition
to me it is interesting because those who used
the exact keyword typed in the Search box is
only 25,800 and the other indicators are also low.

It tells me that out of 4 indicators, 3 lights says
it's a "GO".

Now, it doesn't end there. You must still check out
the total back links of each of the top 10 competing sites.

These are also indicators of strength or weakness. If the top
ten sites have hundreds of thousands of backlinks..then that
signals a "NO-GO". However, if the top ten sites have minimal
back links that you can easily match..then it's a signal of a "GO"

Remember, all of these are "INDICATORS" of positive or negative..
of a "GO" or "NO GO".. You analyze keywords to make an informed
decision rather than just making a decision based on "WILD GUESS".

After this comes the real work of building links to actually beat the
other sites..but that is another topic

All the best,

I use Allintitle and exact match to find the top 10 for each, so I can review the competitions keyword use, PR and popularity.

What I don't understand fully, when checking backlinks, do you mean the amount of backlinks pointed to the exact pages or backlinks to the domain in general? Because when I aim for a keyword I only really aim for it in 3-4 articles, bookmarks and more, so over 3-4 pages my website builds up around 1000-2000 backlinks for that keyword and then move on to other keywords. Is this wrong or?