I'm still trying to wrap my head around the competitive part of SEO/Keyword research. I was wondering if anyone could tell me some general figures/guidelines for competitive analysis?.. For example, (after reading through Brad Callen's SEO course), you want your competition to not have your exact keyword in their title, meta tags, or anchor text as it might be hard to rank for that chosen keyword, along with at least two of the top ten results being a PR of 0. But what about the number of backlinks to a site?.. In his course he says if a site has at least 1,000 inlinks, then you shouldn't try to go after that phrase. I was also wondering about the number of times the keyword appears in anchor text on a site or the total number of sites that have that specific keyword (I.E. "buy dog biscuits online cheap") in their title (I.E. 500 results).
Just put the keyword like this "keyword" and run a search. It'll give you not a certain estimate, but something near. You can also try intitle:keyword to see how many actually have the keyword in their title.
Thank you for the reply. So, using allintitle, allinanchor, and looking at methods such as backlinks, PR, and the domains age. What numbers should I be looking for?.. An example for all in title would be like, less than 500, and for all in anchor, less than 100, etc. I know I should be looking for at least two domains with a PR of 0, but, I'm not sure about the rest of the factors.
Use your keyword in the right places like title, description, header tags, anchor text and alt text (if you have images). Build links from sites with high PR and focus on quality rather than quantity. That should really get you going.