O.K. - I have been doing IM for almost a year now. I can get ranked Top 10 for just about any keyword that has around 4,000-5,000 competing sites, for exact match "keyword". And I have ranked for keywords with alot more comp. without really trying too hard as well. My strategy is simple -plenty of content on my blogs/sites. Back-linking through Articles, Web 2.0, Press Releases, and Bookmarking. I definitely do alot, and I seemingly can get ranked for many keywords very quickly. But what kind of competition can reach for - can we get rankled for keywords that have 20,000 competing websites with the standard methods I mentioned above?
Some of my websites rank well with these methods for the most competitive keywords around. It is important to build the links for a long time and get quality backlinks - it is not only about quantity.
To check keyword competition: * Run your query in google without quotes. * Run your query in google with quotes. Here you should get less than a million hits unless you're willing to work hard for rankings. * Run your query in google using the "allintitle:" modifier. Here, the best keywords will have only a few hundred or low thousands of hits. * Optionally, check the pagerank of the first ten or so hits for your keywords. If the pageranks are low, you can probably rank high for those keywords.