Keywords and article marketing

[Redness44]

So here I sit struggling with my keyword research to go along with my article marketing.

My question is this...How many competing pages vs. searches are too many to bother using that keyword/phrase. For example I'm looking at a KW with 110,000 search volume and 1,310,000 "competing pages".

Other kw ratios are as follows;
485,000 (cp) to 33,100 (volume)
28,000,000 to 673,000
183,000,000 to 6,120,000
and here's one that I like...6530 pages for 2900 searches

Is there a "magic" ratio that seems to rise to the top?

Bryan

 

[jumar112]

Take a look at the top 10 competing pages for your keyword/phrase.

Do the top 10 have that exact keyword phrase in the page title? description? meta tags?

do the top 10 sites have high PR (6 or above?)
I found that seoquake.com (downloadable for Firefox and IE) is great to use when doing SEO research.

When looking for actual competition. I will go into Google and do an advanced search.

"keyword/phrase" By using the quotes around your words it will bring up the web pages that have that keyword/phrase in the title and/or description exactly as you have typed it.

Then go to the last page of your search and look at the results.

Example: keyword phrase is niche marketing help.

If I just type this into google I come back with:
Results 1 - 10 of about 9,450,000 for niche marketing help.

But when I put the quotes around it: "niche marketing help"
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,460 for "niche marketing help"
On last page it shows just 34 pages.

This is how I see if the keyword is to competitive.

I use the rule of thumb that anything under 600 pages is a great keyword to use and should not take long to start reaching the top.

Over 600 I will have to do some work to get to the top but it can be done with linking building and other SEO.

To look at a web page's meta tag:
In Firefox: go to view, then to page source.
in IE: go to view, then source.

Many of the search engines do not use the meta tags, but I still do put in 3-4 for that page. Even though a few of the SE's don't use this, I feel it is still good practice to still put them in.

Hope this helps.

 

[Linda Buquet]

jumar112

"keyword phrase" shows # of competing pages with phrase anywhere in the page. Some of these pages won't be much competition at all and really don't count.

I use allintitle:"key phrase in quotes" Then it only pulls up the number of
serious competing pages, those are the ones that have the key phrase in the title.

So for allintitle:"niche marketing help" there are only 18 competing pages.

However niche marketing help does not show any search volume in Wordtracker so may not be worth targeting.

Redness44

I don't know of a ratio to shoot for. The better you are at SEO the more easily you can tackle a little more competitive keywords.

 

[jumar112]

Hi Linda,

I don't use the allintitle because I want to also see how many pages the search engine shows as being "competitive" for that keyword/phrase.

I just used niche marketing help as an example to explain what I was referring to.

Since we all strive to get on the first page, looking at the top ten helps see what I need to do to get up there.