I'm thinking about doing some SEO for a keyword, but would like to know how difficult it will be before getting started. I used to use SEOmoz's keyword difficulty tool, but it is no longer free. Is there a good way to accurately determine how hard a specific keyword is to optimize?
Just use common sense, you don't need a tool. If your keyword is "oragakilupotopa" then there isn't going to be much competition, meaning it will be easy to optimise for it. If it is "sports" then it's going to be a little harder. Also, try not to focus on a word, but a series of words. It is a lot easier to optimise. Focussing all your efforts on one word is VERY difficult.
Using common sense is good when the difference is small You can use the following tool from SEOChat to judge the difficulty: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/
Well, in some situations, when it comes to series of long-tail keywords number of returned results in SERP’s can be a good indicator of a competition, too.
I guage the difficulty manually using a few Google Operators like i've been doing for years. I'll Cut & Paste some of my reply to someone the other day showing the difference in competativeness between "Rapidshare" and "Rapid Share" allintitle:rapidshare - 1.3 Million results allintitle:rapid share - 16,100 results allinanchor:rapidshare - 250,000 results allinanchor:rapid share - 14,700 results allinurl:rapidshare - 782,000 results allinurl:rapid share - 9,550 results "rapidshare" - 24.5 Million results "rapid share" - 873,000 results These show the amount of pages with the fundamental SEO attributes, like the keyphrase in Title, Anchor, URL and the exact keyphrase on the page. And as you can see the term "Rapid Share" if alot less competative then "Rapidshare".
Sweet funny's suggestion is excellent. You should also check the top 10 sites or so for the phrase you type in. Check how high quality they are, if they're doing SEO or not, how old they are etc. The better sites you see in the top 10 they more competitive the phrase.
All the formentioned suggestions are great. I'd add to those the more results returned = the harder its going to be, and possibly the longer you may be sandboxed if a newbie for the term. You should also check out Google's new tool - Google Trends - it can really help when you need to narrow down what words to target ~ http://www.google.com/trends