Some newbie questions

1. You can't analyze the difficulty of ranking for that keyword using the GKT (google keyword tool) itself. You can do this manually (by checking different factors such as PR, on-page optimization, general site quality, backlinks, etc.) or you can use an automated program such as Market Samurai or Traffic Travis.

2. No. Content across the web gets republished all the time, including the images. Google doesn't really care about you having the same picture as someone else. In fact, it probably can't even recognize the picture if you change its name.

3. Check Google Adsense Policy

4. Illegal sites? You should elaborate on that. Sometimes your website can get penalized by Google for linking to "suspicious" sites. Refer to Google webmaster guidelines for additional information.

I would generally go for a .com .org or .net although you should be able to rank any tld the same.

You can get the monthly searches off the Google keyword tool and then look at Google trends and as long as the search volume is not too small you will be able to get an idea of the fluctuations in search volume. Nothing is an exact science for this but will help to give you a good idea.

If you are new to this then as zannix said use the free version of Traffic Travis for a good idea of how easy it should be. Really with anything you should look at the top 3 as these are the ones you need to beat and where you want to be!!

Question number 1: Here you have a quick guide to evaluate the competition for a keyword:

- Type the keyword using quotes in Google search box, as if you were doing a regular search, and look at the number of search results. This will tell you how many web pages contain the keyword are indexed by Google. As a rule of thumb, I discard keywords with more than 200.000 competitors (but you might want to check the strength of those competitors first - I explain how to do it below)

- Your goal is placing your site in page #1 of Google SERP. This means that you have to beat at least one of the pages that are already in the top 10 search results in order to occupy its place. So, you have to assess if there is any chance to beat any of the pages on the top search results in a short- term period. To do it, you have to evaluate 3 main factors:

1) Their on-page SEO (especially keyword on the page title, keyword on H1 headers, and keyword on the URL)
2) Their PR
3) The number of backlinks

PR and backlinks are the most important factors.

To get all the data at once for the 10 sites on Google top search results, you can use a free tool called Niche Market Finder. It will grab the data for you and help you identify which keywords are easy to dominate by showing a matrix that tells you how strong every factor is in those pages.

Question number 2: Google will not penalize you, but you might infringe copyright laws. Look for creative commom images

Question number 3: Agree with Zannix

Question number 4: I don't know what do you exactly mean by "illegal sites", but stay away of anything illegal.

I'll answer number 1:

First of all, the competition you see in Google AdWords is not the real level of competition of a particular keyword. Try to test other keywords tools and you will find different information.

Another thing is that, the difficulty on how you will make that keyword ranked is not based on the level of competition. So don't be confuse about this. If you think you can get on top, then go target the moon!

Regarding 1. Look at the number of search that has been made from google for the last month. Go for the keywords that has less keywords and low search queries.

Privacy is the major issue, if you post copywritten picture then you should give the credit. Read adsense privacy policy carefully

Hi again,

2 minutes ago, I wrote a huge reply to your questions, but the power went out and all was lost So I'm not going to write all that again, but here's what you need to know:

1) Pages on domains that have a lot of backlinks (say 10,000) may rank higher in the search results than the pages whose domains have little or no backlinks (providing the same circumstances). But you can easily beat those pages by building backlinks to your page - it's worth much more than relying on your domain.

2) Look into SEO Spyglass, free edition. Great little tool to analyze our competitors

3) It's not worth nothing. It has some value, but very little. There are a lot of easy, free ways to get PR2+ links which are worth a thousand times more than PR0 or PR N/A links.

4) You have to take the full number into consideration, regardless of the anchor texts. But by looking at how many backlinks there are with a particular anchor text, you can see if that site is trying to get ranked for that keyword.

Afterall, backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text will be worth more than other backlinks, when trying to rank for that keyword (with exceptions of course, a PR7 backlink with anchor text "goat milk" may rank your site higher for the term "stereo systems" than the PR0 backlink with the anchor text "stereo system".

P.S - *bumping* your threads is against WF rules.