Hi all I am trying to improve my keyword research techniques and would really appreciate some feedback from any experienced members that actually know what works and what does not. My general plan of attack is to focus first on relevance, then on estimated traffic. No problem so far. Assessing keyword difficulty is proving to be more challenging. I have heard that the number of sites competing for a keyword phrase has a bearing on the competition level for that keyword. However, if I filter out keywords with say more than 20,000 competing sites and then analyse the strength of the top ten sites that are using this keyword (using Market Samurai) there seems to be no or very little correlation between the number of competing sites and the strength of the top 10 sites. Does this mean I should not filter out keywords based upon the number of competing sites?? I have also read (Dan Thies) that allintitle: allinurl: allinanchor is a better way of assessing how many sites are actually optimizing for a keyword as this is my true competition. That makes sense but can anyone provide meaningful figures? Eg. <2000 means light linking only, ...... Can anyone provide an allintitle: figure that could be used to determine an easy level of keyword competition? Is it better to use a highly relevent keyword with for example 50 searches per day or a slightly less specific keyword with 250 searches per day? If anyone out there is using Market Samurai and is willing to share a proven (to themselves) method for systematically choosing keywords based upon high relevance, sufficient traffic and low competiton I would love to hear from you, Thanks in advance, Greg
Sorry Greg, I've been busy working. Generally, the number of results turned up by a query are NOT indicative of how competitive a keyword is. What I like to do when analyzing keywords is conduct an "exact" match search, then look at the number of searches made with that keyword (the "search volume") and then try to get a quick and dirty rough estimate of how difficult the keyword will be to rank for by looking at these three values, adding them up, and dividing them by "3". inanchor, intitle, inurl (if you want a more precise result, use allinanchor, allintitle, and allinurl instead, but still add them up and divide that number by three). The result you'll get when you add those three numbers up and divide them by three will give you a rough idea of how easy (or hard) it will be to rank for that keyword. 0-49 is "easy" 50-299 is "medium" and 300+ is "hard". "Easy" keywords can be ranking #1 (or at least the first page) any time between the date of indexing to a month or two, "medium" keywords being typical will likely take between 6-9 months, and "hard" keywords taking a lot of SEO muscle to rank for. Of course, this all depends on how well you optimize your content and the quality of the links you acquire (for the record, blog comments, MOST directories, forum posts/signatures, and social media SUCK when it comes to quality).
Hi Dan, Thanks for taking the time to reply. First let me say that I am sorry to hear about your mother. My thoughts are with you in what must be very difficult times. I like the poem a lot. If more people took responsibility for being the best they can, instead of blaming what they are unable to control, the world would be a better place. Can I ask if you have tested your method over time. Please let me know if I am using it incorrectly. I tried using it to assess the difficulty of a keyword that I am interested in. When I used the allintitle:"keyword " allinurl:"keyword" and allinanchor:"keyword" and averaged the totals, the score was less than 10. If I use the intitle, inanchor, and inurl then the average is about 5,000. If I understand you correctly, that is the difference between a very difficult and very easy keyword. Also I have tried putting the keyword into a keyword difficulty tool like: http://www.seologs.com/keyword-difficulty.html or http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/ and they both reckon that the keyword is of medium difficulty, whatever that means. I can't help but feel that if you can look at the strength of the number one position in the SERPS in terms of the number of links, the average pagerank of those links and the frequency of the keyword appearing in the anchor text, then if you can beat that you have a chance of ranking number one. At the end of the day, what does it matter if there are a trillion competing sites if you can give Google more of what it rates than the number one position does. The problem as I see it is that it is pretty difficult to work out an algorithm unless you have tried various permuations and measured the results. Unfortunately, I am merely a newbie.
Well, like I said, I like to play fast and loose with my keyword research; if I need detail (such as client work), then I use a program that gets me the exact info I need. I have tested my method over the past couple of years, but I am starting to notice some changes in the way the search engines are working, and apparently they're screwing with my system. I may have to use my software full-time until I can adapt to the new changes and figure out what they did.
Man if you can teach me some of your methods how to get the traffic I can pay that for u as I think you wouldn't want to teach me for free so if you can help me send me pm plz I will wait. thanks before hand