I have been targeting this three letter keyword because I read that it is better to target three words than two words because competition is less and searches are more targeted. Well for the past three weeks my site has been number 166 sometimes it goes up and down and this is with the quote marks around it and 30 thousand competitors, well I made a search and took one word out so now it's 8 million plus results and my site is on page 4. Can someone tell me the logic on that? Less competitive, less searched three quoted keyword I'm deep into page 13, highly competitive (in the millions) two word broad search my site is on page 4. Thank you in advance
Number of search results returned does NOT indicate how competitive the term is with regards to how many actual searches are done for it. There may be millions of results but few sites are actually trying to rank for the term as no one searches for it. Never use quotes to do your searches (people don't use them). Pay attention to the top ten results because that is your competition - i.e. if you can't get into the top 10, you're not going to get traffic. If your site is new (less than 6 months to a year, depending on the keyword) wild fluctuations are pretty normal.
Thanks for the info, I researched this keyword with google and according to them it has an average of 15,000 searches per month, that is way better than the one I was targetting, hey maybe I got lucky on this one. yeah my goal is the top ten, my goal is 6 months to one year so we'll see again thanks for the info
Your anchor text and on-page SEO might be more geared towards high competitive keyword. Google doesn't rank number 1 for 'search engine' in google itself. (see my point?)