Ok I have a very small website its only a year old with 140 pages but I like to write about things that I like and review products I recommend to make money. Trouble is the things I do rank for generate little traffic so I looked at slightly higher keywords such as "best Ipad cases" and the many related words with it but I still can't get any good rankings at all and keep getting little traffic. The first page for any of these "best ipad case" terms practically bring up the same pages of big computing blogs like Macworld, T3 etc. To be frank some of these pages aren't informative in my opinion they are just slideshows of their best cases with little text whereas mine are top lists with more detailed explanations. I also have articles about the "secondary keywords" on my site but I can't find anything on them on the big ranking blogs so I do feel I provide more value. I'm just thinking these blogs have so much authority I can't get anywhere with this. I feel like its just too competitive and that I've done all I can. You know, there are tonnes of people reviewing the same products as me so its pointless me reviewing them and my secondary pages still can't compete even though they are more specific. The blogs have a massive social following whereas mine is very very small. I have recently read Pat flyns securityguardtraininghq.com and Niche purusits bestsurvivalknifeguide.com niche challenge stories and I have done exactly what they have done. Except pick a good keyword I suppose. Thanks
Use Keyword Planner or LongTail Pro and check out the competition. Learning what comprises keyword competition for yourself will serve you much better than having someone say yes or no for each one. It will have much heavier competition than Security Guard Training. Pat explains keywords and keyword competition pretty good in his Niche Site Duel articles. I'm not trying to be mean; it's like giving you a fish or teaching you to fish... Also, be aware that using a trademark in your domain can potentially be problematic later... although Apple in general seems pretty cool with it so far. That being said, the reason websites like Macworld, et al, are ranking higher is because they have better age, PR, authority, and a butt ton of backlinks. Rather than trying to rank individual pages on your website, try building separate pages in Squidoo or Hubpages - they give you multiple ways of monetizing plus, more traffic potential to start, and you can still do SEO. I have a handful of articles on there that have made me quite a bit and I havne't really bothered optimizing the pages.
Yeah I would recommend investing in a tool such as market samurai or LongtailPro. They make it really easy to check how easy it will be to rank for a certain keyword. They are all based of adwords keyword tool so you could also use that if you don't feel like spending any money.
Thanks everyone I have started some keyword experiments to try and get some practice for identifying good keywords to target.
unless your site gets a lot of traffic or has a lot of links, "best ipad cases" is really too popular of a term to rank highly on. Try The tools listed above and think of more obscure but popular phrases you can prioritize.