Basics Of How To Check Keyword Competition

If you have a website and want it to rank well in the search engines, you need to know how to check keyword competition. Good keyword research is important for any website, but we all know that not just any keyword will work since there is always competition.

Keyword competition is very important for Internet marketers doing both ppc and article marketing. Competition for ppc will have an impact on the price you have to pay for your keywords and for those of you doing article marketing it will determine how difficult or how easy it is to get ranked high in search engines search results. Ideally you would like to be ranked first under most competitive keywords but that is extremely difficult and not very likely to happen unless you have significant amount of experience, devote a lot of work and some considerable resources.

Here are the basics of how to check keyword competition:
1. First of all you need to know approximately how many sites are competing for that keyword. Do an exact search in Google by searching for your keyword in quotes "like this." Using quotes will give you the number of sites that have that exact phrase in their sites, giving you a loose idea of the competition. Some people say to stick with keywords under 5,000 quoted results but I tend to go a little higher if it is a profitable keyword.
2. Do a regular search for the keyword. You want to rank in the top 10 results, right? Yes, so now we will focus on looking at the top 10 competitors, because the other results don't matter if you can't beat these websites.
3. You need to check for basic on-page SEO for the top 10 search results. Do they have that exact keyword in their URL and in the title tags? Do they have the keyword used a few times throughout the content on the page? If they are not optimized well, using your keyword effectively may be able to beat them.
4. Check for backlinks. Yahoo SiteExplorer or other free tools let you count the number of backlinks to that specific webpage. If the top results have thousands of links, it may be hard to beat them, but if they only have a few links (less than 100) it should be pretty easy to get more links than them.
5. Check for Google Page Rank. Download the Google PR toolbar or use other free tools to check the PR of the top results. PR 1 sites are easy to beat, but PR 8 sites will be near impossible to beat.

There are also keyword research tools to help make this whole process really easy. Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder are two popular choices that give you a very detailed report with lots of statistics. They have a learning curve, but they are very thorough.

The easiest option is through Wealthy Affiliate though. It is a training site that shows you how to make a website, get traffic, and make money. It is a very detailed site with a lot of training, videos, and tools.

They include an easy to use keyword tool that gives you a list of keywords and shows you their search volumes. And using the factors above (backlinks, SEO, etc) it gives you a simple number showing how easy each keyword will be to rank for. No extra work is necessary, just pick the "easy" keywords and focus on them.