I am targeting few of keywords for optimizing my website.So which all keywords I should target ? Any method to know the exact competition ?
Type your keywords into the Google search box with "Quotes" and that will give you how many websites are targeting your keywords
It doesn't matter how many websites have that term in their content or links. It only matters how strong the top 10 websites are. If it is a very high volume keyword, you may also want to look at the competitors on page 2 as well. I recommend you install the SEO for Firefox addon. Then when you search Google you can examine each website's stats such as Google backlinks, Yahoo backlinks, PR, alexa ranking, etc. Ideally you would take this one step further and see how good their backlinks are. In particular check the PR & quantity of their links that use your target keyword. I use SEO Elite to quickly see backlink info for a website such as anchor text usage.
Try searching in google.com, using the allintitle: query So, for example: allintitle:"silly cats" This will help you to see how many sites use the exact term in their title tag, as a phrase... THose sites will tend to be targetting that term ;-) Hope that helps!
As one of the previous posters suggested putting your search for it in quotation marks on Google is a really great way to give you an indication of the competition. Let me put that in perspective for you. With a little trial and error, you will learn how powerful some websites are at overcoming a specific set of search phrases. As an example I can tell you that any search phrase in quotation marks that has less than 5000 competing websites, If placed on a popular directory as a post title on sites such as Kijiji or USFreeAds will easily get to the first page of search results for that posting. I used the strategy all of the time to market my website and my products. I pick a long tail key phrase that relates to one of my products put it in quotation marks and if the competition is anything under 15,000 I do the dance of joy, because I know that if I put some free listings on many of the popular free directories that those listings will rank on page one of google often within 24 hours.
I use this thing called matt's free keyword tool. It gives you the top 100 results from wordtracker and then you can run a search to see how many competing pages all the keywords have. You can amass a lot of data within a short period of time.
This guy hit the nail on the head for your question. These SEO tools are a great way to quickly examine and get some good info on websites. The current top 10 sites are what really matter.
What you want to know is statistics and there is nothing like "exact" in statistics. therefore you can't know the exact competition. although you can use various tools to know the approximate competition.
It does not tell the competition. It tells how many times the query has appeared in the websites which are in the index of Google
Google AdWords is a good tool but it should not be used for SEO purposes. It informs about the various parameters of keyword/keyphrase but in relation to PPC and not SEO
Paid and free version of Word Tracker is best for this job... use them for idea.. but best thing is your analysis about that business.
check out compete.com, that has a tremendous amount of analytical details used by many SEM/SEO Companies
I like to use Keyword Discovery (keyworddiscovery.com). This is a pay for service, but works very well. They give you a stat called "KEI" which is the keyword effectiveness index for any given keyword. KEI takes into account traffic, competition, and other variables to give you a good idea of which keywords will be most effective. The idea is to find a balance between search volume and competition.