Afet trying wordtracker but realizing their database draws on low numbers of searches, I decided to stick with the overture k/w tool and iweb tool. Spent hours all day yesterday and today doing k/w research and v. disappointed to find all the high volume k/w's for my market (psychic readings and astrology) returning millions of web pages. But it seems there is a way to determine your competition in a much more focused way : by going to google.com and typing in : allinanchor : your word you will return a number of results for that keyword. According to the article here, where i found out about this tool : http://www.selfseo.com/story-18526.php (sorry it's not a live link but i haven't posted much here so am apparantly not allowed to post live links) well if you return a figure of under 15,000 for a keyword that has got a decent amount of traffic according to whatever k/w research tool you used, well then it is worth going ahead and optimizing your page/site for that word This is interesting, for when I searched how many times in a given month a person searches with the term " free psychic reading" , I learn a massive 10,777 people used that keyphrase in one month. When I simply type in the search term "free psychic reading" I learn there are 1,730,000 web pages to search through containing that phrase. Way out of my league of course, so I have been mentally discarding using phrases like that BUT when you go to google and type in (no quotes when you do it) allinanchor: free psychic readings the results here are much more focused and tell me there are 62,600 pages : if i optimized a page for this term then, i would not stand much chance of getting to page one of google BUT i would stand a chance of getting some decent traffic nonetheless perhaps. If you have a high volume keyword or phrase that returns a result of LESS than 15,000 then apparantly that is a k/w worth trying to use. When i learn that the phrase "psychic email reading" had 2,253 searches in one month and type this into google, i learn there are a whopping 1,550,000 pages with that term in it. I've had a similar result with dozens of words and so have been thinking to myself "pretty pointless using that then" as probably alot of us would BUT when i type in (no quotes ) allinanchor: psychic email reading , the results are narrowed down to 17,400 - so it's a different story. And when i type that same thing into yahoo, the results are an unbelievable 149 pages !!! so I have learnt that simply typing your keyowrd or phrase into a search engine to see how many pages it returns is NOT a true gauge of how much competition you have. If you try the same thing out (allinanchor:word) with other search engines like Yahoo or MSN the results are massively lower again, so with the smaller engines there is even less competition Intersting to me, has anyone else used this method as a way of gauging competition ? Is this tool a good thing to use as a basis for determining what competition you have for keyword usage from other sites ? I mean if that's true, the results tell me I have only 149 pages to compete with on google for the term "free psychic readings"????? and BIG QUESTION before i choose words according to this method : when it refers to "allinanchor" am i performing a search to see what website pages have that particular term in there internal, anchor text links OR is it to do with what web pages have that term in their page title tag, meta tag, image tag, description tag, or what ? Am not sure what it means exactly thankyou !
Sorry I am probably newer than you and unfortunately cannot give you an answer on your question. But I just wanted to say thanks because it was very informative to me. Thanks again