Best way to determine actual keyword competition?

Google's "low, medium or high" refers to Adwords, not the search results.

I use Google Adwords keyword tool for finding keywords, no. of searches per month, for determining competition, I search in Google, how many pages are coming in result, what is page rank of top ten pages, have they done on-page optimization effectively or not.

The Google AdWords competition tells you exactly what it is supposed to tell you. That is a rough idea of the level of competition among Google AdWords advertisers. It has nothing to do with SEO, nor has Google ever claimed it did.

As far as Traffic Travis... mostly complete rubbish. I guess it is ok for a quick overview of something, but the metrics it gives you are pretty much useless.

Number of backlinks doesn't tell you anything. I can show you sites with 50,000 backlinks that I can outrank with 5-10.

PR... While PR is a ranking factor, it is fairly minor when you are looking at a specific SERP. There are plenty of high PR pages ranking for keywords that they are not even trying to rank for. 5-6 PR 4+ pages might show up in the top 10, but in reality they could be extremely easy to outrank.

Traffic Travis tells you nothing about the quality of incoming links to a site or its internal link structure.

As far as its actual ranking system of easy, hard, extremely difficult, etc... It does take into account the number of listings in the index when it determines the level of competition, which is another useless and misleading metric.

Personally, I like to dig into the top 3 sites myself and see what is going on. I like to do a more detailed link analysis than simply how many links a site has and what anchor text it is using.

the goal do you want to determine keyword competition is to be #1 in google search engine so I think google adwords keyword tools is enough keep the exact result, for more targeted , and see in search engine result and compare with your experience in seo , could you beat them? if you can't handle it pick another , and keep learning :-) ,

Maybe there's no right or wrong , or the best or worse tools but with all your experience you must be know what effort you must to apply or learning again

I use SEOMOZ to check the keyword competition. It is really good and also shows proper rankings and competition for every keyword in 3 ways: Low, Moderate and High.

I do by manually checking myself as I feel it's more exact

Since it is 2013 already, what do you guys think is the best way to do it right now.

I use this simple method - When I choose a keyword,I go to google.com,type the keyword and see the 1st page results.I analyze all of them,check PR,check backlinks etc. and I make a decision then.

I am using Google Adwords keyword tool and very well satisfy with it.

Yes the competition value on google keyword tool is for google adwords, it's not related to SEO competition but it can be used as indicator to know the keyword has potential value or not, adsenseflippers guy always use competition from mid to high as their keyword research steps.

You already doing fine by doing analysis on top 10 competition because this is where the competition really is, there are many keywords tool who can do this so it's only your tool's preference.

SEOMoz's keyword competition can be misleading, try enter super long tail keyword and you will see it will return above 50 for some keywords, this is issue that i read from some blog, you can try find the blog source from search engine so i will not rely on this value.

Analyze your top 10 competition, if you can find few sites with PR 0 and low backlinks, then it's good signal that you can target those keywords, don't need to use complicated rules, keep it simple and it will works.