I hear people talking about how competitive different keywords are in regards to SEO...does anyone know of or has a competitive scale they follow? Something like... #1 Position Will Be Cake = less than 100,000 results A Little Work To Get It Done = 100,001 - 500,000 results Average, But Doable = 500,001 - 2,500,000 results Are You Sure You Don't Want Another Hobby? = 2,500,001 - 10,000,000 results If Your Not A Big Timer In SEO, Don't Bother = 10,000,000+ results Any ideas/thoughts? Feel free to adjust my results scale above as well...I just threw those numbers together since I am new to going after traffic for terms I want to target.
I think there is a few other variables here, what is your budget in money or time for the project as all keywords can be targetted just depends on how much time you want to invest. Also I believe you need to look at the individual competitors for the keywords also, see how big these sites are, how many links they have etc and decide considering you budget whether you can compete with them. Reason I look at this is a keyword may be not very competitive and targetted by great sites, if this is the case skip it no matter how many search results there are.
Yes, the number of sites in a given set of results is not a particularly good way to tell how competitive a keyword is. Product pages are a great example of this - there may not be too many people targeting a particular product phrase, but if big retailers like Pottery Barn, ThinkGeek, WalMart, and Amazon are all carrying the item, it will be an uphill effort for the average e-commerce retailer to outrank them.