SEO: How do you Actually Determine The Level of Keyword Competition?
Monday, November 24th, 2008[ad#large_rect]
In the world of SEO or search engine optimization, most “self proclaimed gurus” will claim that they can rank #1 or top 10 for such and such keywords in Google for may be 4 million “competition”. Well I am not saying that they can’t but are those so called “competition” are really their competitors? To look for real websites that engaged SEO techniques to drive more free traffic to their sites, used the following search engine command as a test:
- intitle: keyword
- inanchor :keyword
- intitle: “keyword”
- inanchor:”keyword”
The results returned from those commands are actually as described by Terri Wells from SEOchat.com are directly competiting with your for your keywords. But before, we explain much more about SEO competitive analysis, let me explain what those command do.
Intitle: Keyword
The title tag as we discussed earlier, is the most important element on your on page seo effort. For example my recent web page titled “biggest firesale bonus” currently ranking #4 for that keyword. Well, I didn’t do much about it and in fact I wrote my title which starts the keyword I was aiming for plus little back links from squidoo, blogspots and wordpress and that’s it. So by using that command, you will know
exactly how many websites that are directly competing with you in the search engine space.
inanchor: keyword
This command returns how many websites that uses the keyword in their anchored texts. This is another essential part when search optimized your site. For example, if you searched the keyword “affordable web hosting” using that command, Google returns around 6000 websites.
intitle: “keywords” and inanchor “keywords”
For this one, it actually make no difference if you are only targeting a single word as your keyword, but if you have multiple words, which tells google, “I want three words next to each others as my search query and please don’t return me anything else”. For our example, affordable web hosting, google only returns 90 results.
Now come to the next question, does it necessary mean “affordable web hosting” is a good term to target then? It depends on the search volume then. If there is only a few, (100 say) looking for that term in search engines, you definitely don’t want to waste your effort to optimize the site where little people are going to search for. So how do we find out the search volume then? There are some tools on the market, both free and paid that offers some form of keyword analysis so that you know which terms potentially can give you more free traffic to your site! So how do you that?
next time, we will show you a video that covers three tools that I personally use when doing this search competitive analysis. so stay tuned!

