BASIC Keyword Research Criteria -- Your Opinions Please

I guess I'll give you my go around:


* broad/phrase/exact match results...if so, how many?

Depends on my website really. If it's a micro niche site, I'm not going to try and rank for something with 5,000+.

However, I ALWAYS use exact match (I think that's pretty common sense SEO)

* intitle/allintitle results...if so, how many?
I don't do the 'numbers' game that people play. I use what we humans call a 'brain'. I begin by looking at the top 20 websites. If a MAJORITY (ingenuity here - again, there are other advanced techniques that come after these first tests) of the sites do not have the keyword in the EXACT ORDER as my phrase, then I go further - otherwise trash it.

* inurl/allinurl resluts...if so, how many?
Same as above. However, this one is even more dangerous to tango with. If in the top 20 you have keyword.com, keyword.net, and key-word.com... there's a good chance that those websites are also SEOed for titles and it's not worth your effort on smaller niches.

* other stuff...if so, how many?
One thing, that I'm sure I'll get bashed on for, that will help your venture in a keyword tool (I'm assuming) that I use is finding web2.0's, videos, etc, on the top 10 pages. If I see a Squidoo or an EzineArticle (or even worse - a lesser article directory than Ezine), I'm feeling pretty dang good about that keyword. All it takes for me is to get an EMD and just get equivalent on-page SEO (Title/text), and some backlinks and I know I'm going to surpass that article in rankings in time.

No, the number of searches doesn't make a difference in how easy or hard a keyword is to rank for. It makes a BIG difference in whether it's worth bothering, though.

Put a different way, if you had two keywords - call them A and B - and all your keyword research showed them to have identical numbers across the board on every single thing you can measure except: A had 10,000 search results/month and B had 20 search results/month, then they're equally hard/easy to rank for, but you wouldn't bother trying to rank for B.

In determining how easy or hard a keyword is to rank for, you're basically trying to gauge how strong the competition is for the keyword. There are a number of factors that measure this: intitle/allintitle and inurl/allinurl are just a couple of them.

But there are really two different kinds of measures of competition we can look at.

1. Measures that take into consideration the sheer number of potentially competing webpages.

Basically, any measure that's expressed in numbers of pages is like this. The number of pages Google reports when you search, either with no quotes (broad match), with quotes ("phrase match") or with brackets ([exact match]), inurl/allinurl, intitle/allintitle - all these are examples of this type of measure.

2. Measures that look at how well the webpages that rank on the first page of the search results are optimized for the keyword.

Here we aren't looking at the sheer number of pages that in some way appear to be "about" the keyword we're interested in; rather, we're looking at how well the pages that are on page one (where we would like our page to appear) are optimized for the keyword.

You also need to consider on-page vs off-page competition. On-page is stuff like whether the keyword is in the title tag, the url, whether it's in the page content and how often, whether it appears in heading tags or emphasis tags, and so on. Off page is basically incoming links.

Then there's page rank. Page rank is a google measure of the popularity and trustworthiness of a page. It's harder to get on page one if all of the other pages that are already on page one have high page rank.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying there's no hard and fast rule, but just looking at title/allintitle and inurl/allinurl is not enough. Backlinks are hugely important, and they are thought to be a major influence on page rank, which is also considered by many to be very important.

It's theoretically possible that there could be a keyword for which Google only finds 10 pages. 10 total results. 10 allintitle, 10 intitle, etc. But if each of those 10 pages had high page rank, great on-page optimization, and tens of thousands of backlinks, it'd be pretty damn hard to get your site onto page one.

It's also possible that there could be a keword for which Google finds, say, half a billion pages, but not one of those half a billion pages has page rank, good optimization, or more than a handful of incoming links. In that case, it should be easy to get a site on page one.

Confused yet?

Sorry, I know you asked for a "basic answer".

Here you go: if a keyword has fewer than 50,000 phrase match results, it's usually pretty easy to rank for. From 50,000+ to 250,000 phrase match results, moderately hard. From 250,000 to 500,000, hard but still doable. Over 500,000, really really hard. As with anything else, there are always exceptions.

Bob Voges
Keyword Bonanza

After years of studying formula's and ratio's I now just look at page 1 for the KW, straight away you can tell whether it's reachable or not, ideally you don't want to be competing against aged, established authority sites.

Thanks as always guys.

God speed, etc!

You're all awesome...especially 'bvoges'.

Cheers,
Steve