It's recently been brought to my attention that I don't know a thing about keywords. My apologies for starting a new thread about keywords but I wanted to tailor it more for myself. Can somebody clarify all of this for me. First, is this the resource I should be using to find the approximate number of searches for a keyword in a given month: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Secondly, I should be using the Approx Ave. Search Volume Column for the results, correct? And leave match type on broad? And I should ignore the advertiser competition column since I'm not using adwords but rather since I'm writing articles and researching keywords to include in the articles, correct? Next, I put the keyword into quotes in google and do a search for it, correct? Very Important: What sorts of figures should I be looking out for for both the average search each month from the google keyword tool, and the number of resulting pages from my google search? What numbers are ideal in both of these searches in terms of, one, it gets a lot of searches each month, and two, but it's not too heavily competitive. And one final question regarding searching within quotes: Does the number of competing resulting web pages matter without quotes? For example: I found a keyword which had what I thought was a good number of average monthly searches according to the google keyword tool. I then did a search for that keyword within quotes and found it had a relatively low number of competing pages. When not putting that keyword in quotes, I found that it had millions of pages, and every one on at least the first page were all for reputable and serious looking companies that I likely would have no chance in beating out to get in the top 10. Therefore, what is the point of the quotes if no one searches in quotes, and did my keyword which I just described have a chance for ever being competitive? Isn't searching the keyword without quotes an additional factor to consider than just finding the number of results in quotes and seeing how many monthly searches on average come up for that keyword in the google keyword tool? Thank you very much in advance, and hopefully somebody kept up with me there. Please, this will really help me out, I appreciate it everybody.
1. yes. 2. yes, and you should still look at advertiser competition though. zero competition indicates that there's either no money being made with this keyword, so no point in targeting it, or in rare cases that you've found your gem if the niche is very new and you're sure your product will sell. very high competition will also indicate that apart from ppc'ers its very likely that there are other bum marketers like you because the niche is apparently very profitable. so advertiser comp chart gives you some hints as well. 3. search "in quotes" indicates how many websites are targeting this EXACT phrase. this is who you are going to be competing with. if you want your articles to rank high without any additional linkbuilding i'd say you should target keyphrases with around 50-100 searches a day and with no more than 30-40k competing websites. this should be pretty easy to start with, before you get used to researching niches properly, as long as top ranking websites don't have hundreds of good backlinks. and as you mentioned, there are cases when some authority websites rank high for completely unrelated searches, just because these words appear somewhere in their content. in this case i'd suggest to find another niche to start with. and dont target 1-2 word keywords, unless they are very niche specific. search for long tail keyphrases, you wont have to compete with random authority sites then.
First of all, for a serious KW research you should use different research tools. No single KW research tool gives you exact no. They all differ a bit so you should look for the average results using at least 2, better 3 different tools. If you target a search sentence you want to go for, you should use "match" if you use broad, the results will be for any combination and similair expressions instead of your search frase. Competition in search results; if you just type your search frase without quotes the returned results will show the no of pages that contain this words. That's not your competition! Your competition are the pages that have the exact frase in exact order (as you typed) on their page. How reputable the sites of your supposed competition are, is not important at all. You should use Yahoo site explorer, or just type in Yahoo link:domain.com to see how many links point to your top ranking competitor's sites. This allows you to estimate how difficult it will be to achieve top rankings - but not always; I ave actually a site ranking no 2 with less than 100 inbound links while the competition needs 13.000 ! to be no 1 - you see good onpage optimization can save you a lot of link building.
I put it on phrase, as this makes the figures clearer. anything over a hundred i do. If there's frig all comp for a longtail that gets 100 searches a month and a 250 word ezine will sit at no'1 then why not. Honestly - this is down to a whole host of factors,.. i've seen ezines just submitted at no2 for 40k phrase search comp, and i've struggled on the first page of under 5k sometimes. Depends on the competing seo for similar pages, keyword set up...etc etc.. i did do a little experiment and that was that an 800 word article beat the pants off a 250 word one in terms of ranking 4 the same keyword setup.