What numbers do you look for when doing seo with web 2.0 properties?

Hi Brad,

The number of competing pages that Google estimates when you use quotes gives you an idea of the size of the field of competition, not the strength of competition. It's only useful in narrowing the scope of your keyword research. Ultimately you must look at the web pages that are listed on page #1 of the SERP to determine the SOC.

Search engines don't rank pages based on the number of backlinks, they rank them based on relevance. The total value of backlinks can influence the relevance of your web page to a particular keyword, but it's not based on the number, it's the relevance of the anchor text weighted by the PR that determines the total value.

Of course there are many other factors that contribute to the overall relevance score of a web page and you must consider all of this to estimate the SOC. If you think this doesn't sound simple, you would be correct in that assessment.

To keep it simple, look at the web page listed at position #10 of the SERP for your targeted keyword. Create your own rating system for on-page ranking factors based on a scale of 1-10. Create a similar 1-10 rating for backlink factors that considers the number of inbound links with relevant anchor text, multiplied by the approximate average PR of those links, divided by the average number of outbound links on the linking page. Then combine your two ratings to get an overall SOC score.

While this is a bit over-simplified, it will get you much closer than the other methods you are looking at. With practice, you should be able to get pretty good at scanning the details of a competing page and do a rough estimate of it's competitive strength.