Keyword Competition - Don't Pick The Uphill Battle
While people may search for your keywords all the time, it's useless to you if your website doesn't rank for them. It's extremely important to analyze the competition: if you are entering an arena that has millions of competitors, it could take years to get the first page of the search engines. So how does one effectively analyze the competition?
Let's say you enter the keyword "digital cameras" into Google. You'll see over 110,000,000 websites listed as search results! However, these aren't your true competition. Try searching again, but put the term in quotes- this returns webpages that have that exact phrase on them. Using the digital cameras example, the number of sites drops to 70,800,000; while still a daunting number, it's still almost 40 million less competitors.
Now, for the true measure of competition. Your strongest competitors will have the exact keyword in the anchor text of links pointing to them from other websites. To determine this, simply enter the following syntax into Google: "allinanchor:digitalcameras." This shows only websites that have links pointing to them using the term "digital cameras." The total number of competition shrinks again to 39,200,000 - almost a third of the websites we originally started with.
At this point, balance the number of monthly searches and the competing websites. An often used equation is the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) which is the total monthly searches divided by the raw competition.
Once you have a solid list of keywords, type them into Google and visit the top ten websites. Are they authority sites like CNN or Wikipedia? Do they provide multiple pages on the subject, or is it just this one page? What is their Page Rank? Remember, if you cannot get within the top 20 results for a given keyword, you may as well throw in the towel.
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