Am I supposed to use quotes when checking the amount of competition?

You should do both, but quote searches are far more relevant

You're better of just using the Google keyword tool to find exact phrases, search volume and level of competition. No quotes necessary there.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

So... without quotes there are over 3 million results. With quotes, there are only 2,200. The latter represents my true competition, right?

I've been reading that find a good keyword with under 5,000 competing results is great. I just don't know if they are talking about with or without quotes.

Either way (regular google search with or without quotes) is pretty meaningless. It could show 1 billion results, but maybe only 20 of them are actually trying.

Use the allinanchor and allintitle functions. Then check out the backlinks of the results that place well in both.

I found this so far:

allinurl:keyword, allintitle:keyword and allinanchor:keyword

to help other newbies reading this thread.

Yeah, exactly. Allintitle will show only results using the phrase in their title tag. Allinanchor will show results that have an incoming link using the phrase in anchor text.

Meaning - the sites that show up in both queries are the only ones that are actually making an attempt to rank for your phrase.

Oh, thanks for the allintitle/allinanchor suggestion, I never even thought about it.

Okay, what do you think of this?

I found a long tail keyword (3 word phrase) with 12,000 searches per month. Only 7 search results in quotes.

But the allinanchor: search results are 20 million! LOL

Is this keyword one that I should pursue?

This is one of those areas where, after you get the hang of it, you'll know your answer within 30 seconds every time.

If you PM me the keyword, I'll take a look, then come back and post my thoughts (without revealing your KW, obviously).

Ok - not gonna say the KW, but I'll put it like this... it's one of those phrases where the word order makes a big difference in the # of searches. Like "low carb diet" vs "diet low carb." The 1st will show way more searches, but, really, the 2nd isn't much less competitive... because the anchor text will be pretty much the same for both phrases.

Now when I do a quick scan from the 1st page of Google for this phrase, here's the initial thoughts:

1) Ezinearticles.com ranks #6 - this is good, EZA is a joke to knock off

2) The top result is about.com - which almost never ranks intentionally. So they're not hard to knock off either.

3) The #4 site is a 1-page sales letter, which I don't see often (but I'm usually looking at physical product type keywords)

Now I'm just gonna do a quick look at the backlinks of the two sites above. Use Yahoo for this, and only pay attention to the external links (easy way to do this is to download the Search Status plugin for Firefox).

a) EZA - showing 20 links. Haha. Looks like he submitted 1 article which points back to his EZA article. He put the article into Digg. And he also did some other social bookmarks, and looks like a blog comment or two.

b) About.com - ok, this isn't the norm for this site, but they've got 394 incoming links to the page. They also ran #1 in the allinanchor (however, they don't use your phrase in their title). I only scanned through 30 or so of the links, but they seem to be "natural" links... This page can be knocked off too, but it'll take more time/effort than EZA will.

c) The sales letter site - they've got close to 700 incoming links, but looks like almost all of them are recips. Which means they're weak. Not hard to knock off.

Ok, so I'd give this phrase a green light to go after. HOWEVER - I only mean that in terms of "how hard would it be to rank."

I'm not saying you'll make money with this phrase even if you do rank. That all depends on your offer.

Wow, thank you! And thanks for the explanation of how you examine the date. I'm installing the firefox addon right now.

When you pop in the firefox addon, the specific thing I was checking was: Show Backward Links > Page External Only > Yahoo

Super, I got that all figured out. Neat tool!

Angie,

The firefox plugin is called Search Status. It's free.

About dates, I'm not sure about that one either.

There are two answers to this. (I came in kind of late and haven't read the whole thread, so sorry if this was answered already. )

1.) If you want to see exactly how many sites are competing with your exact keywords, you'd use quotes. This will give you a good view of your actual competitors in the marketplace and what they are doing.

2.) If you want to see where your site sits in the Search Engine index when the majority of searchers are looking for your keywords, you would not use quotes. Most searchers don't use quotes when they are searching and if you are number 3 WITH quotes, but number 12 without quotes, you need to do more SEO for your site, because most of the people searching for your keywords won't find you because you're on Page 2.

Sorry, it was a typo! I meant DATA, not date.