Best all 'Allintitle' and 'Allinanchor' counts???

For me 10K or lower is great deal for both criteria. But you should not focus on these two criteria only. You should also consider how many links your competitors have, how high their pr, how old are they, and are they top level domains?

Yes, "allintitle" really doesn't matter. How many people include a given keyword phrase in their title is of no consequence to you, since your only real competition is those sites/pages on Google page 1. What matters is the strength / authority of those competitors' sites/pages.

Of course, "allinanchor" is a different story, because that's about backlinks / off-site SEO - and that's really what gives sites their ranking power.

But rather than sweat the numbers, you should be looking deeper. A page could have 10,000 backlinks, each with the specific anchor-text of the main keyword it's targeting, but if those backlinks are all lightweight and PageRank-0, it's not going to be terribly difficult to beat them out with a much smaller number of properly-anchored, high-PR backlinks.

So allinanchor is the one to look out for then? I have been looking at allintitle but didn't really consider allinanchor. Maybe I need to start checking that one instead!

Well, running an "allinanchor: whatever" search gives you an idea of the sites/pages which have actively built (or amassed) "relevant" backlinks. Because if they had none, they wouldn't be included in the count.

That said, the total number of pages (or the overall count) returned for an "allinanchor:" search doesn't matter that much, neither.

The count could be 1,000,000 or more, but if each site/page included in that number has very little authority and only a small number of properly-anchored, low/no-PR backlinks, then they're not exactly strong competition.

So it can give you a slightly better idea of the number of "active competitors" than an "allintitle" count can (given that many pages are automatically generated anyway, on scraper sites, aggregators, etc - but backlinks are less often automatically generated to them), but in the end none of these figures mean as much as the figures you get from analysing the first page Google competition for any given keyword phrase.

It's just that if I was going to try making a judgement based off slightly superficial data, I'd rather know how many "competing pages" there are with properly anchored backlinks than I would without them.

In the end though, you only have 10 real competitors - and those are the ones on Googles 1st page. All that really matters is the strength of these sites/pages.

You could just as easily ignore the "allinanchor" and "allintitle" figures altogether, and just reverse-engineer and analyze the first page Google competition, really.

Sorry if this is confusing.

Thanks Direstraits - no not too confusing, I usually look at the top 10 competition anyway so we're on the same page there

Thanks for your explanation though it is quite helpful, I would rather change my research to looking at allinanchor as opposed to allintitle if allinanchor is the better option. I hadn't really seen much info in searching allinanchor before so I found this quite interesting.

Thanks
Sheryl