As you well know, there are lots of opinions when it comes to the choosing of the type of keyword phrase to focus your content plans around. Many "gurus" suggest that the best performing keyphrases will shoot to the top of Google if you focus on on phrase searches and exact searches. I agree that the search volume that you target will be more realistically targeted to our content while using these factors, but I am starting to lean toward my own opinion that while the search numbers might be more in tune, the real competition picture can only be made if you base it on broad search. Why? Because I now have a few great websites, with #1 rankings for several popular keywords in "", but when searched for broadly do not even make it into the results. To make matters worse, the terms I have chosen often get cut off at about 4-500 results when doing broad searches, making it even harder to track my progress toward the top. Has anyone else ever experienced this? If I were to take the "guru talk' without a grain of salt, I should be at #1 across the board right now. It is nice to see yourself at #1, but as most non-seoers will never search with quotes, it does me little or no traffic good. I am sure that with a little more backlink work, and a little domain aging, things will improve, but I thought I would drop a line in here to ask: 1) does anyone who has experienced this themselves have any sound advice. This has been a complete WH affair, but might think of hitting stat sites for referrals or hitting one or two social sites with account bombs, but fear downgrading, deindexing, or bad neighborhood association. I can throttle well, but you never know. 2) and to tell all newbies that even though the majority opinion is to base your SEO on phrase or exact searches, I now try to understand that for more common words, the broad search competition results might be more realistic, and that while exact searches reflect traffic goals more realistically, the number of results are the number of results, and that phrase matches for broad searches are not always declared top dog. It might suck to take the largest competition and the lowest traffic to base your project on, psychologically, but if you want to feel good, target a word you made up with no competition and you will be number one in no time, but if you want $$$ or SE traffic, then bit the bullet and face the facts. If you do better, great. But paying hosting fees every month for sites with no broad search traffic can be a pain after a while, especially if you think you should be doing better because of some 50k phrase competition guideline you read in an ebook or on your favorite SEO tool site. Before I get flamed, I do want to add that my particular situation is probably exacerbated by the fact that most of my keyword competition in phrase match is over 1.5 million strong on the average, making broad sometimes 4 times that, so for those targeting 1 mil minus, it might not be as much of a factor. I have also switched from a straight competition count to a backlink value algorithm, which has been a success so far, as well as saved me a lot of useless work, though added to my initial research overhead. Its been a while since I've mouthed off on the boards, so I have a third question. How are you all doing?