I'd like to think I'm a numbers guy. Does anyone have a ball park number they use to determine if a term is 'competitive'?

I'd like to suggest 500,000 results for a keyword or search term.

What is your number?

Hi,

To know if a term is 'competitive', it's more the ratio supply / demand that needs to be considered :

The supply part can be found with the search engines are the supply and
the demand part can be found with the overture tools or 7search...

I think that the same number of results in a search engine, the keyword can be competitive or not... it all depends on the demand.

Fab

The results numbers are often worthless.

For example, if I choose "kljajhfjhsahfkhfashklfh" as a keyword, and then spew forth 500,000 pages full of that keyword, that does not exactly make it competitive.

The key is rather the number of different people all trying to optimize on that keyword - which is a much much harder number to figure out.

But what is the question behind the question? Why exactly are you trying to get a number for what is "competitive"?

if it is to gauge how well you are doing on the term "podcasting" - the simpler number is simply whether or not you are on the first page of the search results... ;-)

I agree with someguy, I don't look at just the amount of results in the index. I look at other factors to try and determine if someone is optimizing a site, or who is truly showing up for the specific keyword or phrase. I look at sever things:

allinanchor (gives an idea of how many people are trying to rank for this and the amount of pages related to your keywords)

allintitle (same explanation as above)

then I also search overture and keyword tracker to see how many searches per day/month the keyword gets. (Sometimes this will not tell you much)

I guage that if allinanchor is more than 50,000 then it's competitive to me, maybe not to the next seo.

__________________
Join the GreenStalk Quality Web Directory

What is really disappointing is after attempting the email request method of finding new link partners, competeting sites with high PR added a pages targeting one of my previously over looked keywords. Even if their page had Zero relevent content for the keyword their PR carried them on top of mine.

So maybe it is better to use SEO guy's example of using more then 1 keyword/phrase and sprinkle them around as your gathering back links

__________________
Filipina Wedding

Honestly I was trying to guage my success. You see I've got 1 & 2 positions for the term 'voice over job ' which is pretty popular in my industry. It produced 10,700,000 results. I have a dozen or so other terms with a similar rank and I wanted to see if I'm just having good luck ( as I'm not really optimizing these pages from my basic formula ) or if these terms aren't competitive.

On another note: I do vary my anchor text all the time. On my ADDURL page, I will change the HTML code to that others copy/paste into their sites every three or four weeks. That seems to give me a good blend.

Ok, thanks for the tip on 50,000 for allinanchor as being a good indicator.

It's still competitive, but VERY useless

Interactive-it's a matter of comparing the competing pages to the number of times it's searched for each month. I think KEI pretty well encompasses that.

BTW-Awesome job!

__________________
Wildfire Marketing Forum - Visit our free marketing forum to learn and share tips about marketing.

There are also many other factors involved, take incidental competition. You may be forced to compete with Amazon, or bizrate even though they arent "intentionally SEO'ing for your keyword" so that becomes tough.

Another form of incidental competition (a little less severe) is when your constituents are popular. For instance "voice" and "over" are not that popular as single entities but "job" is. But image if you were trying to go for a niche phrase like "casino job online" you have compete with anything going for "online something" "casino something" "job something" and every combination thereof.

I recognize the value however in guaging your job once it is done, and I think you have done a great job interactive

__________________
Vote for your favorite SEO site and tell your visitors about this great place, please link to us http://www.seo-guy.com with the anchor text SEO and let them know how you feel

right on seo guy!

I looked up kw:gifts today and dmoz.com have the number one. PR9 & bizilon BL's too.
there pr put them on top just for haveing the KW in the title tag.

__________________
Free Permanent Links - Wholesale Gifts