Unfortunately, this just takes time and experience. There isn't 1 factor that is the end all be all.

But below are my general thoughts on the various factors, and a quick analysis of the 3 screen shots:

Domain Age -- IMHO, this is *usually* a weak factor. usually it doesn't play that big of a role (i.e., I can get 2 week old sites to beat 10 year old sites), but sometimes you do encounter sites with domain age that are tough to beat and really the only thing you can attribute it to is domain age.

PageRank -- IMHO, this matters ZERO. Backlinks help give a site PageRank, and MAY help give a site rank for a particular keyword if the backlinks are targeting that phrase. But, what you should be looking at are the backlinks, and not the PR, as its the backlinks that tell you the true story. If a site gets a PR7 backlink from a site with the anchor text "hippo", the site will no doubt get a PR boost from that, but it likely will not help it rank for the term "zippo lighter"

IC (pages) -- Slight factor, nothing more. I get sites to rank with 1 page of content all the time.

Backlinks (to that page) -- you should take a look to see the PR and anchor text of the links (to see if they target your keyword), but this is tied for the most important factor.

Backlinks (to the domain) -- if a site has a tons of backlinks to the domain, but only a few to the page, it is likely a sales site like amazon, or something like wikipedia, etc. These sites are definitely harder to beat that joe schmoe's site with zero backlinks that he created yesterday, but with proper on-page SEO and sufficient backlinks they are usually easy to beat.

.edu/.gov backlinks -- in my experience, this matters ZIP. I have seen no added effect from .edu and .gov links so I completely disregard this item.

DMZ/Yahoo - Slight factor, sometimes irrelevant it seems.

On-page SEO Stuff (Title, URL, Description, Header) -- this is the number one factor. You should first look to see how many sites on the first page are actually targeting your keyword. If the entire first page has this mostly filled up with "Y", it is almost always a tough keyword.

cache age -- this is usually an indication of authority sites (i.e., authority sites with lots of pages tend to get crawled frequently), BUT, I get tons and tons of sites to rank well that don't get crawled that frequently, so I don't really view it as an indicator of SERP strength.



SO, basically, first I checxk the on-page SEO items, and then for those with good on-page SEO, I check to see how many backlinks they have to that page and then check the quality of those links (most notably the anchor text used to confirm they are targeting your keyword).

So, with respect to your 3 screenshots:

1 -- It looks pretty easy as the first site with good on-page SEO is sitting on the bottom half of page 1. BUT, I would be interested to check out that site with good on-page SEO (for that keyword) and 437 links is sitting at 8. I would look into that further.

2. Interesting keyword, as the first page all tends to be focused on that particular keyword with respect to on-page SEO, but very very few page backlinks to any of the sites. I would want to know what types of sites these are. I would guess that this is some type of product whereby some interior page on amazon, etc. with zero backlinks is ranking on the first page in almost every spot here. Again, I would say this is an easy keyword.

3. This doesn't appear to be that hard of a keyword , but without seeing the actual sites ranking (which I would need to do to do a complete analysis), I can't say for certain. It seems that the only true competition is #3 as that's the only site with on-page SEO and backlinks to that specific page.

Tom

the middle one looks very easy.. the more green you see the easiest it is.. and watch the backlinks and keyword targetting sites..

[DELETED]

For the very basics it will give you an idea, but if you still want real results you have to do it the hard but effective way...

@ JFVJ, - Tom Goodwin gave you some hot tips. However, if you're asking that question, that means you most likely need to go back over the MS training videos/PDF files. Anthony and the MS team does one hell of a job breaking down KR, SOC, PBR, SEOC, SEOT and OCI. Which you really need to grasp in order to be able to make quick and accurate evaluations.

The whole purpose of MS is for YOU to be able to look at those reports and be able to decode and interpret what you are reading. Honestly, for most people it is usually is a long learning curve, but it is well worth the journey.

I'd say that while all terms shoudn't be too difficult to rank for, the first term is probably the easiest. All of them have low pr <4, the few at the bottom have no domain age, and the ones at the top don't even have the keyword in the title tag.

With proper on-page seo, and by building some links through web 2.0 props and blog commenting, I don't see any reason why you cant rank in the top10 for it.

[DELETED]