Judging SERP competition - what markers are important?

Hi guys. A couple of questions about judging the competition when choosing keywords.

Any answers or tips much appreciated!

When looking at your competition in the SERPs, are you most worried about the top result, or do you consider say, the top 3, or the top 10?

Do any of you use Firefox toolbar plugins to analyze the SERPs? I have the SEO Book thing, and it seems good, but not sure what stats are the most important.

If you see a YouTube video in the results, do you take that as a good sign?
I've seen people claim that YouTube videos in SERPs are easy to outrank.

Are you most concerned with the competition without quotes, in quotes or "allintitle" ? I'm guessing without quotes is most important.

Finally, aside from the actual number of competing pages, what other markers do you consider? e.g Page Rank, etc??

Thanks a million for any replies here.

 

Q. When looking at your competition in the SERPs, are you most worried about the top result, or do you consider say, the top 3, or the top 10?
A. Normally, I will be worried more about top 10 results

Q. Do any of you use Firefox toolbar plugins to analyze the SERPs? I have the SEO Book thing, and it seems good, but not sure what stats are the most important.
A. I won't use any such plugins, mostly i prefer to check manually by using some Tools like opensiteexplorer.com and ahref tool

Q. If you see a YouTube video in the results, do you take that as a good sign? I've seen people claim that YouTube videos in SERPs are easy to outrank.
A. It depends, if the video is providing some valuable information to a user, i do not think that it is as easy to outrank it. But yes, there is a chance of taking it as positive vibe.

Q. Are you most concerned with the competition without quotes, in quotes or "allintitle" ? I'm guessing without quotes is most important.
A. I hope not, if i think as a user, i will try to search for any keyword without quotes (not in all cases, unless and until user is aware of search operators). so i will be more concerned more about the result which i am going to see without quotes

Q. Finally, aside from the actual number of competing pages, what other markers do you consider? e.g Page Rank, etc??
A. Apart from page rank, i do consider title, meta d, page authority, domain authority, age, backlinks.

Hope the answers helps you out in judging a keyword.
P.S: This is my opinion on judging a keyword, it may be different for others.

 

thanks. very helpful indeed

 

- I would look at the top 10 pages

- SEO Quake (for Firefox) is a good toolbar to use to quickly analyze the competition

- I am neutral about Youtube videos in the results. I don't view it as a positive or negative

- I think using quotes is more meaningful. However, a better way to judge competition is to look at the number of searches there are for a keyword (see below for more).

- Pagerank is a quick way to gauge competition, but don't rely on it exclusively, especially since Google hasn't updated Pageranks in about 6 months. Also:
a) For the top 10 results, if there are a lot of forum or Yahoo answers pages in the results, the competition is usually not strong
b) Use Google's Keyword Tool. In general, the higher the number of searches, the more competitive the keyword will be. Also, look at how much people are paying to have adwords show up for that search. If it is a high dollar figure (Like $3 per click) then chances are, the competition will be stiff.