Keywords. I need advice!

When you're thinking about competition, don't worry about how many total competing sites there are. You need to only worry about beating the top 10 results.. that's your real competition.

A (free) decent program you can use to check competition is Traffic Travis. It will show you how optimized the top results are for your keyword. That's really what you need to be concerned with.

One little tip or trick that I like to see is what keywords Google sees my page for. Take a look at the Adsense ads that are on your page. Here on my blog Earn More Money: A Guide To Extra Cash, Google lists ads that say things like make money, earn free money, paid surveys, get paid cash.

All these are possible keyword phrases for me to target. You can find the same information about your page just by looking at the ads that Google places on your page. Just something that I noticed. Of course I could be wrong.

As for ranking, I never care about how many sites there are. I only need to beat the 10 on the first page. See how many links they have, how old the site is...there are other things but a basic SEO analysis of their sites will show you how strong they are.

I'm recommending SEOMOZ trial 30 day. It's so easy for person who's starting out in SEO to learn from pro.seomoz.org/tools/keyword-difficulty

To answetr part of your question do the following

take your primary keyword and go to google type it in quotation marks to see how many competing pages you have.

So if in google keyword tool your keyword was "macaw parrot training" and it got you 5000 searches gloabally and 1900 locally take that keyword and put it in google.

"macaw parrot training" - Google Search (using bitly because the other google link is so long)

In this experiment there were 37,300 results which is easily to outdo when your site is properly optimised for the primary keyword and related ones (very important).

That gives you the amount of pages that you have to compete against with that exact keyword. Next thing is to find the related keywords for the primary one and use that to write content and post to your site.

Google doesnt bother about keyword density they actually rate it poorly what they do put higher inportance on is relevant content and original good content.

If you have your primary keyword in a headline, mentioned once in the first and then last paragrap of an article but then have the secondary or related keywords that support that then you will have good original content that google rates highly.

As for the competition on the keywords google brings back searches for parts of the keyword not the specifics, in this case it was for macaw training, macaw parrots, parrots, macaw, training parrots whic means there is a higher competition and not the true result you are after.

Dont go for long tail keywords that are 2 low in searches other wise you will get no organic traffic or have anythign worthwhile coming to your site. You also have to ID the money related keywords that will generate the right traffic.

Lance

I just want to say that do not worry more for the all competitors. But you need to be more focused on just getting the top position in search results as this way you will automatically beat your competitors.
And as per me instead of looking for popular keywords, you need to use such words for your keyword which people used to enter more for their need. So just make observation for such kind of words in your field and use those in your keyword and provide best content with that. So this way you will get best response from people as well as from search engine.

Is it an absolute requirement that your keyword be in the last sentence or is it ok if it is only in the last paragraph?

Thanks

Trying to select less competitive and long-tail keywords can be a great idea most of the time, especially if your site has been recently launched and still does not have great ranks and positions online. Of course long-tail keywords are not necessarily weaker in terms of generating traffic for websites because many times they can covert very well and leading to sales and profits. By the way do not get worried and puzzled too much with all those numbers and figures.

Using keyword suggestion tools can be very great indeed but there is no need to be attentive to all numbers because sometimes they are rough estimates of monthly searches and competitions, rather than pure facts. After becoming aware of your niches to be targeted, the next move would be picking the terms and then optimizing your website through contents and links. Even primary terms can be targeted but your site will need to have some strong links from quality sources.

There's been some bad advice and misinformation in this thread. Let's clear it up.

Is that exact match or broad match searches. Always ensure you look at the exact match searches to get a much truer figure of the actual traffic for a particular keyword.

The number of results is absolutely irrelevant and really bad advice offered by many SEO courses on checking competition.

As an example, search for

green sweet cream cakes

This comes back with over 37 million results. I can assure you that you could rank this particular keyword phrase in an instant with no effort (of course, no one is actually searching for it, but that's another matter).

What you really want to look at is the strength of your competition on page 1. They are your real competition and where you want to be.

You need to look at factors such as on-page SEO (eg: keyword in Title, URL, images, article body etc) and backlinks (not just the number, but the quality and diversity).

There are various tools that can help you with this information. Probably the easiest option is to download the free version of Traffic Travis.



I think that when Google changed their Adwords Keyword Tool a few months back and replaced the graphic bar with "Low", "Medium" and "High" in the competition column, a lot more people doing keyword research have misunderstood what this competition rating is.

Firstly, this is NOT the competition rating for ranking your site for that particular keyword. It is simply a measure of the number of people bidding on that keyword in their Adwords campaign. This is a useful measure if you are building an Adsense site and in general, it can be a useful indicator of commercial intent, but beyond that, it tells you nothing about how much effort it will take to rank your site for that keyword.

Obviously the holy grail is to find a high searched keyword with low competition. Sometimes that can be difficult.

If you are just starting out, you are probably best to go for something that's not going to be too difficult to rank for. You could pick a keyword with a reasonable number of searches, say 2000 exact monthly searches and then pick a bunch of related long tail keywords. You should find the long tail keywords will be relatively easy to rank for and this will all help the ranking of your primary keyword.

Do you want to know the real number of requeries of necessary keywords? In that for you can help services such as GKT or Semrush. Here's,an example, in semrush you can see not only the number of requests, but also see graph, showing trends for a current domain or keyword