Sure, you may be able to get some traffic if you’re on the second or third page, or in positions 11-30, but don’t count on it.

What this means is that no matter how many competing web sites there are, the only comptetion that matters is the first 10 sites.

The problem is that it can become so easy to be overwhelmed by the number of competing web sites. It’s easy to lose site of the fact you’re not competing with thousands of web sites.

When you think of your competition this way, it’s a lot more manageable. You only have to look at the first page of results. If it looks like you have a chance of getting a spot on the first page, then you can get started on the tasks you need to do to make that happen.

If it looks like it would take too long, move on to another keyword.

When you concentrate on assesing the top 10 sites, it saves you a lot of time. You’ll be able to quickly find a list of keywords that you have a good chance of ranking for.

I know that there is no perfect way to determine whether or not you can get a web page listed on the first page of search results. But there are a few things to look for that can give you an indication of whether or not your competition is vulnerable to your attack…

If you see a listing that links to an article at an article directory site, you have a good chance of beating them. Same thing if the listing is from a Web 2.0 site such as Squidoo, Blogger, or Hubpages.

Another useful tool is the SEO Quake plugin for the Firefox browser. Once installed and activated, you can do a search on your keyword, and once the search results page comes up, you’ll be presented with a lot of good data such as the page rank of each site, how many backlinks the site has, the age of the domain, and a lot more.

To sum up:

Don’t get too concerned with competition numbers. You’re only interested in getting on the first page anyway. That’s where your competition is. Work on getting a good list of keywords that you are interested in targeting.

Then start plugging in the keywords one at a time and look at the 10 sites that come up. Decide if you have a chance of knocking one of these sites off the first page. Move on to the next keyword, do the same, and soon you’ll have a list of keywords that you can use to build the pages that will hopefully get you the free traffic that we all want.

For this discussion, a long tail keyword can be described as a keyword that contains 2 or more words. For example, in the guitar niche, instead of targeting guitar, or acoustic guitar, you could target “how to play acoustic guitar”, or “acoustic guitar folk songs”. You’d still be targeting the guitar niche, but you’d be targeting key phrases with less competition and less traffic, but you’d also have a better chance of getting a first page listing.

Using this approach, you may only end up with 4-5 visitors a day, but it’s traffic that you’re getting for free. And to add to that total, you can target other long tail keywords related to your market. Over time this can add up to a nice flow of traffic.

The key to making this work is to target key phrases that will attract the type of traffic you’re after. If you’re selling a product, you want to be sure that you are attracting buyers.

A good way to see if there are people spending money on the key phrase that you’re after is to enter it into Google and see if there are ads on the right side of the page. If there are, you know that there are advertisers willing to spend money on that key phrase.

If there are no ads, or only 2 or 3, you may want to pass on that keyword phrase and move on to another one.

If you find a key phrase that you want to target, but you don’t have any way to monetize the traffic, enter the phrase into the search engine. Once the results come up, visit the top sites and see what they are selling.

If they are selling their own product, see if they have an affiliate program that you can join. If they are selling affiliate products, write them down, and do a search on the product name to find out how you can become an affiliate.

Long tail keywords can be a good way to get traffic to your site. Just be sure to target buyer keywords.

In case you didn’t know about it, Google has a free keyword tool that you can use. You can access it by clicking here, or do a search and you’ll find the link.

And if you’re new to using the Google keyword tool, go to YouTube. Do a search and you’ll find helpful tutorials that will show you how to get the most out of it.

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The tool I’m talking about is the free Wordtracker keyword tool. I don’t use the keyword tool because I find that I get better results with the free Google keyword tool, and Google gives me more results. What I like to use is the Wordtracker Keyword Question Tool.

What makes this tool so useful is that when you enter a keyword, a keyword phrase, or a question, you’ll get up to 100 questions that have been searched for. These results are phrases that I can’t find using Google, and they show me what potential customers are searching for.

I used the keyword “ipod” because I am going to build an affiliate site for this product, and the keywords that I get from Google aren’t really helping me come up with ideas for content for my web pages. So I entered the word “ipod” into the WordPress questions tool, and I got a list of 100 questions.

Now I admit that a lot of these were next to useless, but there were a lot of good ones there as well. Here are a few examples:

• How does an ipod work?
• How do you transfer songs from itunes to ipod?
• How many songs can a 4gb ipod hold?
• Can I download cds onto my ipod?
• What is the difference between an ipod and a mp3 player?

These are just a few of the questions that were listed, and they can all be used as a starting point for a web page or article. And they can also give me a lot of ideas for keyword phrases that I hadn’t thought of.

The Wordtracker keyword tool and the questions tool are free to use. You do have to register before you can use the site, and there is a limit of 20 searches per day. But it is free, and it is a useful addition to your keyword research arsenal.

Click here to get to the free Wordtracker keyword tool site. Once you get to the site, if you scroll down a bit, you’ll see a link to the keyword questions tool.

It’s free, it’s fun to use, and it WILL give you some really good ideas for your sites.

Good question.

First of all, there is no way to really know for sure that the search numbers are accurate. Even if you accept that the search numbers are correct, you don’t know who is doing the searches. I’ll cover that in a minute. But first…

What brought this to my attention was the trend on the Warrior Forum for new marketers to ask why the keyword that they got ranked for, the keyword that had a good number of monthly searches, wasn’t getting them the traffic they expected.

They were on the first page of the search results for a keyword with high search volume, a lot of adwords advertisers, and they weren’t getting the traffic.

Here’s something to think about…

If you’re targeting a keyword in a popular market, there are a lot of other marketers who are doing the same thing. You are entering the keywords into the search engines, and so is your competition.

How many of the searches that are done each month are being done by people just like you?

If you find a keyword that is getting 5,000 searches a month, how many of these searches are being done by your potential customers versus other marketers?

There’s no way to know for sure. But it makes sense that the search volume may not even be close to what you expected. And it explains part of the reason that you can end up on the first page of the search results and not get much traffic at all.

Does this mean that keyword research is a waste of time? Not at all. You still need to pay attention the search volume that’s reported. It’s still a good way go decide whether or not a keyword is worth going after.

While the search volume may not be exact, the number of searches is still an important number to pay attention to. Higher search volume indicates more interest, and more potential to profit from that keyword.

What you can do is to target more than one keyword in the market you’re in. The other thing you can do is to enter markets that aren’t as high profile. There are literally thousands of markets that most online marketers ignore that can be a good source of income for you. And search numbers aren’t as likely to include searches from other marketers.

?

A mistake a lot of us make is to only look at and target keywords that have a large number of searches. The thinking is that if we can get traffic from keywords that have a lot of search volume, we’ll get a lot of traffic.

While that may be true, it’s also true that not all keywords lead to the action you want your visitors to take.

You can do the work required to get your site listed for the keyword of your choice only to find that your visitors aren’t interested in buying anything. This is more common than you might think. Traffic to your site will only benefit you if your visitor is interested in what you’re offering.

What are targeted keywords?

Targeted keywords are the keywords that people use to search for the products that you’re selling or the information that you’re providing.

If you’re selling a product, you want the traffic from people who are ready to buy. If you’re offering information, such as a newsletter subscription, you’re want visitors who are looking for what you offer.

Targeted keywords lead to targeted traffic which leads to profits for you. You don’t want a lot of freebie seekers and tire kickers coming to your site. You want the traffic that is ready to buy something.

While I’m not going to try and give you a tutorial on keyword research, mainly because there is a lot of information out there already, here are a few things to look for:

• Type in the phrase “how to” in the search engine and see what comes up.
• Enter product names and model numbers.
• Go to ClickBank.com Amazon.com, Ebay.com, Yahoo Shopping, etc., and find the best selling products in the market you’re in.

Create a list of the topics that come up, and THEN go to the free Google keyword tool, or the keyword tool of your choice, and get a list of keywords. Weed out the keywords that aren’t relevant, and save the ones you want.

Once you have your keyword list, go to Google and enter each one and do a search. Take a look at the sites on the first page and determine whether or not you have a good chance of getting your site listed on the first page.

If the competition is stiff, move on to the next keyword. Once you do this, you’ll have a list of keywords that people are searching for with the intention of buying something or learning more.

Doing this will give you the targeted keywords that you can use to create the sites and content that your visitors will love. To your online success…

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A really useful feature is getting the data on the number of links a site has, both inbound and outbound links.There is also info on where these links are coming from, listed by country and by U.S. states.

They have a list of useful slash tags to get you started, and you can always use any tags that you want. The idea behind slash tags is that they are a way to refine your search results.

One thing that may be a bit of a pain in the neck is that if you want to use your own slash tags, you have to register as a user. It’s free, so it’s not a big deal, but I’m not sure why they are doing this.

Here’s a short video demo from the CEO of Blekko:

 

My initial impression of Blekko is that it is worth looking into. The ability to customize my search results and to see how many links my competition have could be really useful. I’m still not convinced that I need to add the Blekko Toolbar to my browser, so I’m going to wait on that for now.

Blekko looks like a new way to search, and the help section of the site does a good job of getting you familiar with the features of this search site. Give it a shot and see what you think of it. Click here to go to http://www.blekko.com

The question is:

How much competition is too much?

Some say that you should only enter markets with less than 100,000 competing web sites. Others say the competition should be less than 50,000. While these guidelines are useful, I want to show you something about competition numbers that may surprise you.

The reality is that the competition numbers you see in the search results aren’t the only information you need before you decide to enter a market.

I’m going to show you how the competition numbers you see are not the number of sites you’re really competing with.

Let’s look at the digital camera market. It’s a big market with a lot of competition. I decided to take a look at “waterproof digital camera” to see if I could enter the market as an affiliate for Amazon.com.

I started with Google, and when I entered waterproof digital camera without the quotes Google showed me that there were 2,500,000 competing web sites. Not good news!

Next I entered waterproof digital camera with quotes, and found that there were 361,000 competing sites. While better, that’s still a lot of competition.

Then I went to Bing.com, entered waterproof digital camera, and found there were 12,500,000 competing sites.

In each of these searches, if I had stopped there, I would have given up hope and moved on to another market. But wait…

I went back to the Google search results page and kept clicking forward in the search results. At the bottom of the page, you can opt to go to the next page, or skip ahead 9 pages deeper. What I found was really cool…

For the search phrase waterproof digital camera without the quotes, with 2,500,00 competing web sites, Google only listed 639 pages. Only 639 out of the 2,500,000 pages made it to the search results pages.

For the search phrase waterproof digital camera with the quotes, with 361,000 competing web sites, there were only 620 pages listed.

Using Bing, with 12,500,000 competing sites, only 819 pages were listed.

Using Yahoo, I couldn’t see a number of competing web sites, but there were only 1,000 pages listed.

The lesson here is that you shouldn’t be deterred by the competition numbers you see. In a lot of cases, you’ll find that there are a lot fewer competitors than you thought there were. With less than 1,000 competing pages in Yahoo, and even less in Google and Bing, this is a keyword that’s worth looking into.

A final tip:
On the Google search site, click on setting in the top left corner, and select “Search Settings”. On that page, you can select the option to show 100 results on each page. This makes it a lot quicker to get to number of pages that are listed on the Google search page.

Let’s say you did target “weight loss” and you DID get a first page listing. While that is not something that will likely happen, there are a few drawbacks to getting there. While there are thousands upon thousands of searches for that key phrase, you really don’t know what they’re searching for. They could be looking for:

• Weight loss tips
• Weight loss menus
• Weight loss ebooks
• Free weight loss information
• Weight loss programs ( think Nutri-System)
• Weight loss workout routines
• Vegetarian weight loss
• Weight loss supplements
• Fast weight loss

If someone were to land on your site for the term “weight loss”, do you offer what they are REALLY looking for? And how would you know. The problem is that the term “weight loss” is a very broad keyword, and it covers a lot of potential possibilities.

If someone is looking for weight loss supplements and you’re offering a weight loss ebook…
If someone is looking for fast weight loss, and you’re offering an exercise program…
If someone is looking for free tips, and you’re selling something…

You’re out of luck…

You have successfully generated the dreaded “untargeted traffic”. People who get to your site who have absolutely no interest in what you’re offering.

Mega-market keywords look really good because of the number of searches that they get every day. But unless you have a site that covers just about everything that someone would want, you’re not going to make a lot of sales.

Another thing to consider is that where you rank is going to affect your traffic. If you’re not on the first page of the search engine results, you’re going to have a hard time getting any traffic. Let’s say you get your site in the top 100 sites for your keyword. Most people look at the first page of results, and if they don’t find what they want, they enter another search term. A few of them may go to the second page of search results. Very few of them are going to go through 10 pages of results to find your page.

That’s why it’s in your best interest to drill down in these mega-markets and target the related keywords. It’s a lot easier to attract the kind of visitor to your site that is looking for what you’re offering. And that results in you making sales. I don’t want you to waste your time targeting keywords that you’ll have a hard time profiting from. The sole purpose of writing this is so you can avoid the mistakes that I have already made. Hope this helps.

Let’s go through an example that will show you why it’s not always a good idea to target a keyword based ONLY on how many searches it gets. This is especially true in the mega-markets such as golf, dogs, and digital cameras. For this example, I’m going to use the weight loss market. Weight loss is a huge market, because there are always going to be people who are interested in losing weight.

I enter the keyword phrase “weight loss” in Market Samurai and find out that there are 818,630 searches per day!

That’s a lot of searches, and if you could get a first page listing on the search engine results page, you’d get a lot of traffic.

Let’s look at how much competition there is for “weight loss” – 65,200,000 sites. Over 65 million sites!

The main lesson here is to ALWAYS look at the competition you’re up against before you decide to use a keyword. Even though “weight loss” is very competitive, you can still enter the weight loss market. When I entered “weight loss” in Market Samurai, I got a list of 200 keywords and the competition for each one.

Looking through the list of keywords, I decided to look for the keywords that had less then 100,000 competing sites that still had a lot of searches each day. Here’s what I found:

• weight loss menus – 325 searches per day – competition of 14,400 sites
• weight loss meal plan – 595 searches per day – competition of 23,400 sites
• weight loss software – 266 searches per day – competition of 26,900 sites
• safe diet pills – 398 searches per day – competition of 45,800 sites
• fastest weight loss – 730 searches per day – competition of 62,300 sites
• rapid weight loss diet – 595 searches per day – competition of 80,600 sites
• weight loss patches – 398 searches per day – competition of 98,600 sites

These are just a few of the keyword phrases that came up, and they show that while there aren’t as many daily searches for these phrases, there is a LOT less competition. And a much better chance for you to use one or more of these key phrases to get traffic to your site.

Weight loss IS a competitive market, but it is also a market where people are spending a lot of money. You can still enter the market using related keywords that don’t have as much competition and will give you a much better chance of getting your web pages ranked well and driving traffic to your site.

Spend your time working with the keywords that you have a chance at ranking well for instead of trying to rank for the keywords that have the most searches. That way, you can still enter any market you’re interested in and start getting the free traffic you’re after.

The tool you use to do your keyword research is important as well. As you’ve already noticed, I use Market Samurai for my keyword research as well as all of the other features such as rank tracker, finding content, publishing content and much more. What you need to know is that the keyword module is ALWAYS free. Once the trial period is over, you can still use the keyword research part of Market Samurai forever. It’s a great tool to make keyword and competition research quick and easy. Get your copy by clicking here.