What do you need to do to rank for a term...

One thing I forgot to mention above, these keywords do have a good amount of competition on them.

A good post in a wordpress site with appropriate keywords and ranking will do it everytime.

Budget Can Mug no 1
About 1,030,000 results (0.26 seconds)

promotionalmugsandglassware.com.au/budget-can-mug-for-your-business/

Quentin

That's not enough information to come up with any real answer. How many people search for that term is irrelevant to ranking. It's entirely how well fortified the top sites are (PR, Backlinks, Age, etc). You could easily get into the top 3 with a simple page and 15 backlinks in one market. In other markets with much stiffer competition, that wouldn't do squat.

You need to analyze the sites that are ahead of you. How many back links (from what sites, what is their PR, what is the anchor text), domain age, PR etc.

I've just got a site of mine to number 6 for a local keyword. Has about 60,500 searches per month. I have absolutely no backlinks at all yet.

That worked because the ones I outranked had no optimization at all, easy to beat.

It depends on so much. Like Alexa said, I would look at your competiton. If you are a new site trying to outrank PR7 and above sites for the word "Computers," good luck!

There are so many factors involved, IE: backlinks, domain age, quality of comp., other off page SEO and on page SEO ...

I find it to be quite simple IMHO as I have put many website (even turnkeys!) with little to no backlinks on Google for terms up to 50+million results by simply completing the following steps...

1. Keyword related domain (not required just helps get the serps up a little faster)
2. Apply your site design and content... For the content create it your self or head to a forum and get a ghost writer.. As for the keywords and description just checkout what the competitors are using on their site and use that as a base to build off of.
3. Go to www.DomainTools.com run your URL in the whois and click "site profile" scrool to the bottom of the page and click the SEO Browser box... Should be something like this:
http://www.domaintools.com/seo-brows...n=yoursite.com
4. Fix all issues the seo browser is showing wrong with your site.
5. Find you a good site to link to, "I personally use forums, blogs, sitepoint"

Provided that you complete and do the above listed steps you should see your site up in the serps with in 1-2 weeks tops (Sometimes in as little as 2 days!!!)

Hope this helps.. as it has for me several times!

The best advice I can think of is to put aside a few hours and read this:

http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...xperiment.html

Competition is really irrelevant, unless you are monitoring the first ten results. The results are that are on the first page of Google are your real competition, and in reality if you are not in the top 5 then you are likely not going to see much traffic at all!

Focus on updating your blog weekly, and make sure that you are building quality links via article marketing, blog commenting, and submitting a press release to a few websites.

It isn't rocket science, it just takes a little work.

Doing the proper keyword analysis, do all the promotion techniques and following all the effective tips of SEO, then you will improve your rankings even though you have a lot of competitors. Just keep on doing it till and observed. Or else if you don't want a long process and you have a big budget better do the adwords programs and manage it properly.

OK warriors, I took your advice and found a high traffic niche for which the top website has about a 100 backlinks. People please guide me how can I analyze the quality of these backlinks. Is there a way?

Alexa and mlord10 are absolutely right.

At the end of the day, you want your site to be up there in the top 10 or top 5. And as such, your true competition is only those top 10 or top 5 sites.

Study them, spy on them, whatever. Check their number of backlinks. Check how many H1 tags they have and their keyword density. Did I say check their number of backlinks? Yeah.

Then go out there and outbeat them.

Web Warrior, it all comes down to links in the end. Links are like votes of popularity and if you consistently start building them to your home page and your inner pages using services like SEO LV, MAN, AMA, Syndicate Kahuna, etc you'll be able to push forward.
This is a simple starting point, as you progress, link variety becomes important as well as your age. Also check to see how many of the top 10 sites are authority sites -- much harder to go up against. AND check to see how many are article sites and web 2.0 sites... much easier to break into the top 10 if you see any of those.

you also cannot rely on backlink checkers to judge competition. it is all a guessing game really.

They could be building links using redirects to hide how many links are really coming in. those redirects could have thousands of links with all that juice flowing right into the main site. I have seen this done before to hide from the seo tools how many backlinks they really had.