Well it depends on the pages you are examining. For example, a site might have hundreds or even thousands of internal pages and some of them could have top ranks online, getting monetized very well and being too difficult to cope with. In some cases even the ranks of inner pages of domains might be better than their homepages due to stronger links pointing at them. Of course choosing the profitable keywords can be one part of trying to find the best terms for sites.

Usually, the primary keywords which are suggested to you by keyword suggestion tools might not be the best terms to stick with, because they are extremely competitive at the same time. Using less competitive words and long-tail phrases could generate finer results after some time. Internal pages of websites, just like sites can have their own ranks and traffic shares, this is a technique used by webmasters whose sites might be monetized through ad publishing too.

The backlinks to the domain also give a sense of the age and power behind the site as a whole, but you need to look at the specific page you want to rank in terms of backlinks. Look at both the internal and external backlinks to that page.

I look at the PR for the page that is ranking, links to the ranked page and SEO tags.

The only time I get concerned is if the root domain is a large site like wikipedia. That just means that it will take a lot of time to rank above it.

Market Samurai is pretty good at letting you know if they keyword is good. Also make sure you get pretty kick ass link building then you don't have to worry.

Yeah in market samurai it shows the domain age, page rank but then the back links to page and backlinks to domain. Some have a few backlinks to page but quite a few to domain. For example a website like amazon. U cant compete with backlinks to domain but wud u still be able to end up above the amazon site? (not talkin about homepage)

I love Market Samurai and it is pretty easy to use. You can get all the info that you need and it also shows you how difficult or how easy to rank a certain keyword.

I suggest you go with it

Page backlinks is what you are up against. Domain backlinks show you how big/competitive the site is overall together with amount of pages indexed, but in terms of ranking for a specific keyword domain backlinks don't matter that much.

Check out any of the Amazon pages. Obviously Amazon has a LOT of domain backlinks. But if you try to compete with a specific product subpage and this page doesn't have backlinks you can outrank it pretty fast.

Edit: Sorry, doublepost.

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