Flashback: Advanced Keyword Reaserch - Measuring Competition

If you’ve been conducting keyword competition research solely by searching for the phrase in quotes at your favorite search engine, you’re missing the boat, Dan Thies says.

Wordtracker’s “competition search” doesn’t really give you any idea of the level of competition. All it gives you is the total matches for an exact phrase search. A lot of those “competitors” aren’t even trying.

Instead, try these:

First, the very least someone would do to optimize would be to include all the words in the page title. To find out how many there are, do an “allintitle:” search on Google. For a 3-word search phrase, your query on Google will look like this:
allintitle:keyword1 keyword2 keyword3

Second, you can narrow that search down to pages that have the exact search phrase in the title, as a phrase:
allintitle:”keyword1 keyword2 keyword3″

That tells you roughly how many are trying to compete with you. Now let’s see how many are competing on “off page” factors as well. To do this, you want to know how many of the pages with the phrase in the title, also have the phrase in the text of inbound links:
intitle:”search phrase” inanchor:”search phrase”

Now, let’s see how many incoming links the top ranked sites actually have. You may need to match their counts, or get higher quality links, in order to compete. You can look at ‘em with the Alexa toolbar installed, and it will show you, or you can do a “link:domain” search on Google. Don’t just look at the links to the ranked page, because interior pages will show few links. It’s also a good idea to look at their link popularity on other search engines.