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[Note:  Continued from the Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation Tutorial, part II of our Basic Keyword Keyword Strategy Tutorial]

Keyword Competition

The Third Question:  Competition
When it comes to your competition there are two points that are important to remember.  The first is that your real competition for any particular keyword are the top sites which show up in the major search engine for that keyword.  If your site is better optimized for a keyword than those sites then eventually your site should outrank them.  The second point is that just because you can’t compete for a particular keyword today does not mean that you will not be able to compete for it tomorrow.  As your optimization efforts begin to bear fruit your site will start to gain "momentum" which can be used to compete for keywords which heretofore were untouchable.  As such, it is important that you organize your keywords according to their competitiveness, optimizing your site for those keywords which you can compete for today, and saving more difficult keywords tomorrow. 

Assessing the competitiveness of a keyword
When assessing the competitiveness of a keyword, there are two basic elements that one wants to look at.  The first is the quantity and quality of incoming links both to the site as a whole, as well as the individual page which shows up in the search engine results.  The second is what is known as On page optimization.  On page optimization refers to the numerous "techniques" that one can employ to help a particular web page rank well for a particular keyword.  Both of these issues will be explored in greater detail in later tutorials.  For now, what is crucial to understand is that a site which has a large number of high quality incoming links which is also well optimized for a particular keyword will be difficult to compete against.  On the other hand, a site with few and/or low quality incoming links which is not well optimized for a particular keyword will be easy to compete against.  And, of course, there are numerous sites in-between these extremes which will be more
or less difficult to compete against depending upon the factors we mentioned above. 

It also needs to be pointed out that it is often times difficult to analyze the competitiveness of your keywords.  After all, it is not unlikely that you will have hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of keywords eligible for optimization.  For most people it is not feasible to analyze the top sites in the search engine results for each and every keyword.  As such, one needs a means of analyzing large numbers of keywords at once which, at the very least, gives an indication as to whether or not a keyword is likely to be competitive or not.  Currently, the best procedure that we are aware of is to utilize the advanced search features of Google in conjunction with special software programs.  In particular, we are interested in two search features known as the intitle (or allintitle) and inanchor (or allinanchor).  The intitle search feature shows us how many sites have a particular keyword in the title tag of their HTML code.  The title tag is one of the meta tags which appears in the HTML code of your web pages.  The inanchor search feature shows us how many sites have a particular keyword in the anchor text of an incoming link.  Anchor text is text which is hyperlinked to another page on the internet.  For example, the words,keyword strategy are hyperlinked to our keyword strategy tutorial.  As such they are the anchor text of that link. 

What is important to understand about the intitle and inanchor search features is that they show us nothing about the quality of either the On page optimization or incoming links to a web site.  At best, they merely report how many sites you are competing against.  What seems reasonable, though, is to infer from the number of sites that you are competing against the quality of your competition.  Remember, we mentioned above that in reality you are only competing against the top sites that show up in the search engine for any particular keyword.  Chances are, though, that if there are a lot of sites competing for that top spot then the site that wins that coveted spot is well optimized (after all, there are a lot of people vying for that spot, as such it takes more to both obtain and maintain that position).  Conversely, if there is less competition for a particular keyword than chances are that the top sites are not so well optimized (after all, they can maintain their position with minimal effort). 

To learn more about analyzing the competitiveness of a keyword see our keyword analysis tutorial. 

Next tutorial: Keyword Popularity
Previous tutorial: Relevant Keywords and Customer Motivation

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This tutorial written by:
Moshe Morris
President of SEMBasics
Chief Research Analyst at Internet Marketing Initiative (www.internetmi.com)

The content on this page is based on SearchEngineNews.com’s e-book Winning The Search Engine Wars.
To learn more about Search Engine News, click here.