SEO question

a better way to look at competition is by looking at the backlinks of the top 10 sites that come up, if they are all in the thousands then that's a long shot, but some only a have a few then it's a good find

Actually, you only need to compete with the first 10 result on Google for every keyword.

The quote thing is for you to get an idea of how competitive is the keyword. Other way to check competition like allintitle, allinanchor also give you a "relative" idea of competition level.

When you do SEO for that keyword, all number are relative. For example, if you want to rank for your own site and High PR web 2.0 site, the competition count will be different.

The back links you are getting and many other factors, depending on the resources you have and use to rank a page.

If you have powerful tools like bookmarking tools, back links services and high PR back links, you can rank for more competitive keyword. The easiest way to rank page 1 is low competition long tail keyword, you can easily rank targeted buying keyword to make money without many traffic.

If you search without quotes, the engines will return results with pages containing, either keyword...For example, a search for DOG HOUSE may contain pages that have "dog" on them or "house" on them, or both. And, for both, the words don't have to appear together.

However, if you search for "dog house" using quotes the page must contain the exact phrase.

This is why it's a more accurate measure of true competition to use the quotes when researching, as you want to find sites that focus on "dog house", not just "dog" or "house".

Here's a Google hack to give you even more accurate results...Use the three "in" attributes when researching:

intitle:"dog house" inanchor:"dog house" intext:"dog house"
(paste the above into google search)

What this does is find pages that must contain "dog house" in all of the the following:
In the page title
In the body text
In a link anchor text

These are the three basics of SEO and will give you a good estimate of the competing pages that have done basic SEO, which after all, is really what you are researching. It isn't perfect, but it is the most accurate measure of your true competition.

Do the 3 following searches and see the difference in number of pages returned, as well as the results themselves:
dog house
"dog house"
intitle:"dog house" inanchor:"dog house" intext:"dog house"

SEO Book has a very good FireFox plugin for analysis.

Thats a handy tip indeed, thanks for that Kurt.

The reason to put the keyword is to check the direct competition on that particular keyword.

In addition to the above mentioned operators, one can also use allinurl for the keyword. For complete list of operators, see G Advanced Google Search Operators

Yes, excellent tip Kurt! I've used those seperately but never all together..

Thanks

Awesome...I also didn't know you could search like that. Huge time saver for me. Cheers for Kurt.

Looking at the keywords will give U a nice idea. an excellent tip porivded by Kurt. Kudos to him. Whereas SEO has a fairly good Mozilla plugins avaailble for analysis. Can surely try those.

You can use the SEO plugin for fire fox and you can use the free trial version of Market Samurai which is amazing

Have you ever used ranks.nl? This is a great site to help with learning Keyword density and Prominence. Ya know it is still important.

To find backlinks to a site use link:domain.com

Thank you. I have located SEOQuake and I am downloading it now. It is amazing the number of Firefox plugins there are.

Try backlink of the top 10 sites that come up online. Moreover, SEO has a fairly good Mozilla plug ins available for work analysis. That works miracles.