Me, I search on Google using two commands, "allintitle" and "inanchor" when I want to see how difficult it would be to optimize a website for a certain keyword. For example: allintitle:keyword and inanchor:"keyword". I look at how many results there are in total, and I make my assessment based on that. I usually consider keywords as being "almost easy" if there are less than 10000 results for an "allintitle" search. What are your methods to estimate the difficulty of a keyword? Please share.
I personally use Market Samurai. I spend a lot less time to do it and I can even see how the 1st page competition is, if there are not many keyword rich domain wesites and they all have under a couple hundred backlinks, it's a go or me
I use Market Samurai too. For me I do my keyword research manually by counting the average PR of the top 10 in google. If the average is 1.5 or less and the links for the 1st site is 100 or less, I usually go for that keyword. Everyone has a different opinion on how to do keyword research. I hope this helps you get some idea.
Interesting approaches. Is this Market Samurai free, or do you have to purchase it? Also, anybody else have different strategies?
Common sense is also useful. Tools aren't always right, especially considering humans are social beings.
you should use Google keyword tool there you can see how much traffic and global or local searches on that keywords.
Searchengine competition numbers mean nothing. You're only competing for Google's first page (1st 10 listings in the SERPs), unless the search numbers are incredibly high the second page won't get you any significant traffic. Yahoo/Bing search numbers are significantly reduced as well if you're using Google's tool. Download the trial version of MarketSamurai or TrafficTravis (the free version is enough) and you'll be able to get a better idea of how tough the 1st page is, competition numbers mean nothing. If you use the competition numbers you're judging them as a whole. You have to make sure that at the very least at least one of the top 10 listings are beatable (not to many backlinks, PR, listed in DMOZ or Yahoo, edu links, intitle, inurl, etc) MarketSamurai uses competition numbers to filter out the sites so that you don't have to check the searchengine competition individually to 800 keywords. The competion, search numbers and all the other stuff are only used to filter them, the real research begins after that.
There is no need to pay for any tool to find good keywords, as long as you know what you are doing Google Keyword tool can do just fine. But if you have money to spare, Market samurai is worth every penny you spend on it, trust me. As for simple ways to check competition: Enter your keyword in the search box. If the competition on the first page is a majority of PR 4 or higher sites, along with aged domains and lots of backlinks, be prepared to put a lot of effort to beat them. The best way to explain it is, you want to look at competition and what they are doing, then beat them out, maybe minus the age of the domain. That way you should be able to pretty much beat anyone to get to #1. B.Hunter
Sachinsinghnegi, I was interested in other ideas on checking out the competition, not the monthly search volume for a keyword I think this discussion is becoming quite productive. I'll have to check that Market Samurai thing, and see why everybody is praising it.
I usually tend to stick to Googles' keyword tool, it has been very useful for keywords for my automobile accessories ecommerce site, we have managed to get most of all our products in the top 3 searches. What I tend to do though is rank for a lower searched for keyword, and then build up to something bigger.. For example My new website is for web design - so there is noway im going to rank anywhere for the keyword web design at the moment, so im optimizing for "web design west midlands" this way when i get on the first page of google for that keyword ill get traffic and hopefully sales - then move onto much harder competition keywords Does anyone agree with what im doing?
If you don't have money for buying softwares or you plan to do it manually. Here is a suggestion. Download SEO Quake.. It's a firefox plug in where you can check the the links, PR, age domain, and a lot of other stuffs that you can use in SEO. It's free and it saves you time checking individually all the pages of your competitors. So if you see the top 10 having less than 100 backlinks then it's a no brainer to aim for that keyword. Hope this helps.
'SEO quake' is good to check the overall strength of competitor's website. Also you can use some other tools to check important characteristics that support high ranking of a competitor's sites. This exercise should be done with less competitive keywords (checked by any trick) because the website ranking on highly competitive keywords like "SEO forum, SEO, Link Building and more" would certainly be hard to over take.
if you go to website seomoz, you will find loads of free tools available to check keyword keyword difficulty.
This strategy works. I did the same thing for the term "soccer practice plans" and eventually "soccer drills" If I were you though, I wouldn't waste too much time doing SEO for your web design site, it is a direct sales business, and nobody that is going to stumble onto your page is going to buy.