A new look at competitiveness of keyword phrase?

Hi Jason,

Thanks for your input! That's exactly the kind of input I was hoping to get. Fresh thinking.

Hmmm...

Now to follow up on what I said...let's say the 563 site pages that actually show up in the searchable index are the real competition or at least a better indicator of true competition that that other number that shows up as inflated as it sometimes gets.

Is the inflated numbers still indicative of competiveness in some way?

Could it be that most people see the inflated number and focus more effort in trying to rank their pages for the keyword phrases are "deemed" to be more competitive which actually in turn makes them more competitive? When in fact the real competition of site pages actually in the index was far less?

For example...highly competitive niches do seem to have higher total number of pages show up even though the actual number of pages in the index might be likewise less than 1000.

And niches that are not as competitive will, many times, have a similar number of actual pages in the index but with much lower total site pages (I'll call that the inflated number for short).

So I am beginning to think that both the inflated number and the actual pages in the index means nothing with respect to a quick gauge of competitiveness.

But...I still can't get around the impression that phrases with inflated numbers seem to actually be more competitive than one's without. If that is the case...why is that?

Any further thoughts anyone?

Carlos

Yes...I am aware of that Fraggle but surely the duplicates being hid are nowhere near the difference in numbers between 563 and the several millions for cowboy boots....so I don't think duplicate "hiding" is a significant factor for why these other millions don't show up.

Hmm...never heard that one before. Got any juicy Google quotes or other form of evidence to back that up? Maybe that's true Fragger but I've just never heard that...though it does seem that I can never get past about 600 site pages when looking at the last page of a given keyword phrase.

Precisely why I started this thread Fragger. So that I can improve my competive analysis even if I must wade through discussion of stuff that might seem...well...overanalysis or just a waste of time discussing to some.

In line with what I original posted in this thread does anyone know where the suggestion to set the number of results to 100 when searching for a phrase in quotes came from? Or the logic behind that?

I have noticed when comparing site page count results between using the default 10 per page vs 100 per page that most of the numbers are exactly the same. Occasionally, probably around 5% of the time, the number are drastically different.

Anybody know of why such numbers might change so drastically for some keyword phrases and not others based soley on a change from 10 per page to 100?

Sometimes I wonder if we can trust anything Google throws out for public consumption through it's search results .

Carlos

Hmm...interesting. Thanks for your input Fraggler.

I just did some reading searching for everything I could find on Google's supposed 1000 page limit to showing in the SERP's and you are in fact correct. There does indeed seem to be a limit on this.

Apparently Google indexes more pages than what might show up by going to the last page of the SERP's for a given phrase but it ONLY shows the first thousand that IT thinks are relevant.

Hmmm...

It's not that these extra pages aren't in the index at all as I first mistakenly thought. It's that Google just doesn't think any pages past a thousand are relevant to what is being searched for (or maybe it's also a technical limit to allow it to process a search query effectively but regardless I think it's safe to say the first thousand are what Google thinks of as relevant).

Hmmm....

I need to do more reading.

Carlos

I understand the logic of your saying so Mike. For sure. And I am quite frankly tempted to do the same.

For sure, for sure the number and especially quality of backlinks is probably without a doubt the biggest determiner of competition. I like to find pages that have less than 50 backlinks to the page and not that many more to the domain but where all the other numbers are also good. They are rare but they are there. It just takes a lot more keyword research to find them but in the long run my time is better spent building sites around these than just going for whatever seems good on the surface.

But...here's the clincher. Links analysis is probably the most time consuming part of the keyword research I do. I look at not only the total number of incoming links to a page and their quality, but also the number of external to the page in question links, and just the number of external links coming in to the domain.

I just don't have the time to do that kind of analysis until I have weeded some keyword phrases out of the mix.

So I need some quick way to eliminate keyword phrases that might not be so good from a competitive standpoint.

I tried allinanchor:"<keyphrase>" for a while (some marketers swear by this) but found that it really did not improve my keyword selection all that much compared to just using the Google inflated number I have been referring to.

So I went back to using the inflated number as my weeder out "technique". If a phrase returns over 100,000 pages from Google I rarely bother to look at it.

I stick to further evaluation of one's that return less than 100,000 pages at most. Preferably sticking to one's that return 50,000 or less.

I don't know of another number that will serve the purpose to which I put the inflated number Google returns. That will allow me to weed out lots of keyword phrases quickly. To get to the meaty one's.

I know that means I will miss some great one's. But hopefully using the inflated number in that way will leave me a great many which show some promise of not being highly competitive.

I hope that makes sense.

But...as I said I am open to doing things slightly differently if someone can come up with some other relatively easy criteria or number that I can use in place of the Google inflated number (I hate calling it that but I don't know what else to call it).

When I started this thread I did not realize that Google and other search engines don't show more than the first 1000 results so I am glad I started this thread as I learned something new. But I think I will stick to using the inflated number as my weeder criteria since I have nothing better or seemingly so that I can use.

Carlos

I think you are right on in what you say lesarus. For sure we cannot quantify things 100%. We are all going to have phrases that just don't pan out despite the numbers.

Even the one I did last week that showed such promise and that made it to position 5 in a matter of days has returned almost nothing for Adsense clicks. Despite the traffic being there according to the Google Adwords Keyword tool.

It's frustrating and a disappointment but we just got to keep going with it.

Others are making money at this and there is not reason that any of us can't.

What I see is a lot of people giving up when they don't make easy money right away. I am in it for the long haul. I WILL succeed in Adsense.

It is the only way that I know how to make a living over the Internet in a realistic and doable way consistently such that I can then move to another part of the world which is my goal. What I am learning in Adsense will do me well when I branch off into affiliate and other forms of internet marketing.

Carlos

I wish for you great Adsense success lesaurus. Moving to that house in the French countryside sounds really nice. I've been to France and while I don't much care for the snobbery one finds in some of the big cities like Paris....the countryside is a different story. Beautiful! And the people in the countryside are wonderful.

Quite true lesaurus. If a keyword phrase has a ECPC of only $1 vs my usual cutoff of $2 (below which I won't normally consider it) but it has traffic volume of many thousands per month...the payout from such a site focused on that keyword might equal or surpass going for one with a higher ECPC but lower traffic. So one has to use a measure of common sense I think and not cement themselves into hard and fast rules.

Quite true but I think we can make somewhat educated guesses (as opposed to complete guesses) about what is more important than other criteria.

Hopefully we can get better at guessing .

Relevance is extremely important but how Google determines relevance is what we guess at.

In some respects I focus on being super relevant to site visitors first...without too much regard to SEO matters, believing that what is generally relevant to site visitors is what Google considers to be generally relevant too.

Of course given that Google is imperfect with respect to judging true relevance SEO allows us to speed things up a bit and to help Google recognize the relevance of our sites a bit faster than it might otherwise.

But the point I am making is that if we want to build long term, stable success in Adsense or any other internet endeavour we MUST build relevance and value into our sites. The flash in the pan Adsense site might make a killing initially but it won't last long term. I've seen a lot of plain trash when it comes to Adsense sites. I mean sites that are just ridiculous. A couple of paragraphs and a whole bunch of Adsense ads on the page.

On my own sites I do all the writing myself. And I do a fair bit of research for my writing. Sure it takes a lot longer than spinning and spitting out a bunch of lower quality writing but in the long run my Adsense sites will do better I think since they have more inherent value to readers.

When I evaluate my competition, if I know I can beat them on relevance to site visitors...well...that's a good start. Hopefully I can also at least appear to be relevant to Google so that it will rank me well through the judicious use of SEO "techniques" allowing me to beat the competition altogether.

So, assuming my site pages are actually relevant to begin with, how can I influence Google to recognize that relevance and rank me higher than my competition?

How can I beat the SEO types and SEO wannabe's (of which I am one) at their own game?

If friends whose judgement I trust recommend something to me...I take that recommendation and judge it accordingly. As indicative of something that has value.

Likewise with Google I think it is safe to say that it looks upon incoming links from other web sites who it trusts as recommendations of our sites. I think it is also evident that the quantity but especially the quality of incoming links is a top criteria used by Google to recognize relevance.

How would people naturally link to my site? That's what I want to aim for. That's what Google is looking for.

Would people naturally link to my site by writing articles at ezine and pointing to my site through a resource box? Nope.

Would people naturally link to my site by leaving a url in place of a name, scattered about among hundreds of blog comments? Nope.

People naturally would link to my site by including a link inside the text content of web pages. And those links would tend to be on sites that are somewhat if not entirely related to the subject of my sites (or why would they link to my site otherwise).

So I want to focus on getting incoming links where the link is found inside text content on a web page. Not a signature. Not a link where internet marketers can readily leave links (like in place of the name at blog comments). Not through places like ezine that is filled with internet marketers trying to build incoming links to their sites.

But text links inside text content are very difficult to get.

Google is not stupid (I don't think). Seems to me that much of what we as internet marketers think is great is looked upon by them as less than great as part of their efforts to combat search engine manipulation to improve ranking.

While we go around trying all kinds of techniques to influence our ranking...Google just laughs. If our techniques do not mirror the pattern of natural "voting" through links on the part of site visitors I venture to say that much of what we as internet marketers think is effective is, in the long run, a fair bit of hot air. In the short run...yes it might work but not for the long run.

I'd rather build my sites the right way from the get go and not focus on flash in the pan internet marketing "techniques" that do not mirror natural linking at all.

Although Google uses algorithms to determine ranking automatically (for the most part if not entirely) I like to take a step back once in a while from all the SEO stuff and ask myself as to how I, as a person, would evaluate a site to be relevant and how I might naturally link and "vote" for a sites relevance.

To the degree that Google has perfected their algorithms to mirror how a person might evaluate relevance and to the degree that we focus on real relevance and on naturally "voting" for that relevance in ways that a non-SEO or internet marketing person might do...to that degree I believe we will be successful in helping Google recognize our true relevance with the result that our rankings will improve and stay up there.

We won't be the proverbial Adsense flash in the pan. Here one day and gone the next either through a Google ban, penalty, or otherwise.

Like I said I am in it for the long term. I want long term success not a fast buck.

I don't initially pay much attention to on-page SEO factors. I mean I don't entirely discount them but I don't pay a whole lot of attention to them. I don't sweat over my site title or mega (to date I don't even use them yet) tags or whether to use an H1 here or an H2 there. I don't concern myself too much if at all with keyword density and other such things.

I write my pages with content that is useful to readers. That would be useful to me as a site visitor. In other words I initially focus on being as relevant as I can be in what I am writing about.

I then wait to see how a one page site with a highly relevant page of information on the keyword phrase does. It it ranks within the top 100 sites then I write other highly relevant pages to add to the one I wrote and start working to speed up good ranking stability by trying to get some natural incoming links.

The most natural route for me to get "natural" incoming links is to create my own mini-blog around my site theme and to once in a while put in text links within the blog content pointing to my sites. These blogs being at places other than my domain. So that is what I will focus on as a "natural" incoming link strategy.

In truth I haven't thought about natural incoming link strategies too much but I am sure there are others that I can do besides the usual, non-natural, incoming internet marketing strategies commonly used for getting backlinks.

Mostly I just register a site, write one article, wait a week to see how it ranks initially without too much of any SEO effort and then...if it ranks within the top 100 I invest more time in it.

If it gets into the top 10 (which has happened) I immediately turn on Adsense. I know that such a top ranking initially may not last but I like to see how Adsense does on it while it has a high ranking so that I can better evaluate whether my expectations for the site with Adsense look like they might be realized and whether it is worth sinking more time into it or not...as an Adsense site. If not then I just go on to other sites that may pan out better leaving the site alone until I eventually might get around to it some more at some later point in time.

Last week one such site got into position five all by itself (with only one article and virtually no SEO effort...phrase had 3000+ LSV traffic per month). Another one in a more competitive niche got into position 42. Again all by itself. I am building additional sites but I will focus on improving the position 42 one before I focus more effort on the pos 5 one. Getting to a pos 5 so quickly was a great encouragement but the traffic to that page has been way less than what the Google keyword tool indicated might be the case. The pos 42 one shows more promise I think so I will focus on that one. It is often the case I think that the sites which take more effort end up being more profitable.

I wrote the one pagers at each site to be as relevant as I could make them. And I also broke another cardinal "rule" of internet marketers. I included a bunch of outgoing, one-way reference links to high authority sites too and I wrote their anchor text to line up with the subject of my page (assuming I could pull something out of the authority site that was relevant). I will eventually replace some of these with Adsense text links but for now I like the boost in position link juice they seem to be giving me. I figure that most people will not make it to the end of my article and click through a resource link off site before they click out through an ad...that's just speculation mind you but although my articles are great I don't make it easy to read them either by using headings and such. It's just a bunch of text, great text but text nevertheless. Not that easy to read through to the end .

Just thought I would share some additional input on what you said lesaurus for what it's worth.

Carlos

Yes...I think LSI is important. Until I figure out how to analyze the LSI for a given page, perhaps by writing my own script to do it (I am too poor still to afford to purchase some LSI analyzing software) I guess I will have to use the poor man's LSI technique. Namely write naturally and write well LOL.

Absolutely. I don't even pay attention to keyword density. I do however pay attention as I write to how I can say things in a way that is more focused on the particular keyword phrase I am using. But I don't just repeat the keyword phrase blindly all over the text. I will reword the keyword phrase a number of times throughout an article so that LSI comes into play naturally.

I mean if you think about it...if I was Google and wanted to keep internet marketers and others who might want to manipulate the rankings at bay what would I do? I would discount forum signature links (non-marketing types don't usually bother with signatures). I would discount article directory links (non-marketing types don't even write articles in article directories). I would discount site url's in place of one's name on blog comments.

In other words I would discount the various ways by which marketing types try to manipulate themselves into a higher rank position and I would strengthen the weight of techniques that average users would use to link to a site page that they value (such as having links in regular text on a page).

While all us marketing types would go around doing all the marketing techniques I would be happy to let them do those techniques and have them think they work just fine while discounted them all.

Mind you in the absence of valuable on page, in the middle of text, links some of these marketing techniques obviously seem to work reasonably well but in the long run there is no question in my mind that more naturally linking techniques will beat the pants off of the marketing type techniques so often and almost exclusively employed by internet marketers (again Google is not stupid).

I have found in my experience that my site pages start ranking reasonable well if not highly by using just three things on the pages. Highly relevent, excellently written and researched content, naturally LSI'd content. Secondly a fair number of outgoing, one-way links to highly authoritative sites. Lastly a domain name that includes the keyword phrase I am targeting.

I have not focused at all on site titles, meta tags, or any of that other type of stuff.

One thing that I have also done is this...anchor text is important right?

Well it dawned on me when linking out to authority sites...why should I stick to including an anchor text in line with the title of the page I am linking to? I mean it's my site and I can make outgoing links have whatever anchor text I want can't I? Of course I can.

So what I do is look on a high authority site (i.e. wikipedia, mayo clinic. government sites, etc..) page for some mention related to my keyword. I then write my own anchor text for them in a way that contributes to the theme for my site that I am trying to create in Google's eyes.

This technique alone seems to be doing wonders for me. Ezine articles use this technique, sort of, but in an automated way with all the links they have at the bottom of their articles.

But I carefully craft the anchor text of outgoing links.

Yesterday I looked at my sites again.

One site page continues at pos 5.
Another one was at 42 and is now at 53.
Another one is at pos 26.

Those are the one's that come to mind off the top. I just put another two sites with one page each in the last few days so we'll see how those end up.

And that is ALL without a single backlink. No additional site pages at each site. No nothing. Just what I have mentioned above.

Heck...I haven't even worked much if at all to get them indexed in Google. I just put them up mostly and then while waiting for Google to find them I do more keyword research and create another one page site.

And all are targeting keyword phrases with several thousand in local monthly search volume, ECPC of at least $2, and almost no incoming links at all for the top 3 pages that show up in the SERP's.

Mind you the keyword research is very time consuming but obviously worthwhile.

I will now start adding some backlinks to each of the above which will only serve to improve their ranking...perhaps even get them into the top 10.

Please note that we are still talking about only ONE single solitary page at each site. More pages, backlinks, and other such things will only improve their ranking potential.

None of these site pages are suffering the sandbox affect. At least not yet. The pos 5 single page has been up there for almost two weeks and is maintaining position all on it's own.

But even if they start to get sandboxed their initial ranking into the top 100 for the phrases I am targeting tell me which one's are worth focusing more effort on. I have one site for example that has five pages on it and a number of Ezine backlinks but having no outgoing authority links that is down at position 400 something. Another one is indexed but so new that I don't think Google has put it anywhere initially (it's down somewhere past 500 as of today...hard to say as I didn't even find it other than knowing Google has it in it's index somewhere).

I agree with you if you mean leaving links inside the text of a forum post (not the signature which is spammed to death). Leaving a link inside the text of posts is definitely worthwhile I think but few valuable forums allow that. Especially not if you could be said to be promoting yourself through such a link.

As I said...I don't think Google is stupid. They know internet marketing types spam signature links to death so given that...why should Google count forum signature links very highly? In my opinion they don't!

I mean from a common sense perspective. I have no proof or other data to back that up though. Who knows...maybe Google is not as smart as I give them credit for being LOL.

Carlos