I've been reading this forum for a while now and I'm learning a hell of a lot, so thank you to everyone who contributes! I hope in time I can do the same.

As a complete newbie I have a question which undoubtedly will sound stupid and will have an obvious answer but just to clear things up for me...

Why does a keyword (e.g. Porn) show that it has a Global Monthly Search level of 277,000,000 yet the Competition is regarded as Low?

I'd have thought that the keyword 'Porn' would be the highest competed word on the internet!? Not that I ever watch any you understand...ahem...

Anyway, if anyone could explain that to me that would be great.

Many thanks!

Competition means how many advertisers in adsense there are, not websites.. And since Porn is against adsense TOS So really there should be 0.0% competition.

If you're talking about using the Google Keyword tool, and the CPC green bar for competition, it's low because no one will be bidding on a general word like "porn" they will bid on something specific w/ money in it, for example, free chinese porn, if google allowed adult bidding in adwords. imo first try to find a traffic source, then monetize your traffic, dont worry so much about this data and just start testing out your sites and SEO backlinking methods

Of course, I see! Thank you!

So is there a similar tool for guesstimating how many organic searches are made globally/locally per month for a specific keyword (let's say "vacation" this time) and how fierce the competition is for that organically searched keyword.

God I hope that makes some kind of sense!!

You gotta learn to do it manually before you rely on these "tools" that tell half the story, if that.

Analysing the competition = go to the competitions site, look at their SEO, Look at the number of backlinks, the quality of the backlinks

Remember, when you analyze competition, its not about how you will rank, its about long it will take you to rank.

Search on this forum "keyword research newbies"

Those "tools" do not show you how the SEO is on their page, or the quality of the backlinks.

Google is your best tool to estimate traffic. When you see a term in the results in adwords, click it and start analysing the top ten results manually. These tools will say theres a domain thats 5 years old with a PR5 and 180 backlinks....

You get scared.... But these are pretty easy to outrank... with a few quality backlinks..... Could be that those 180 links are total crap guestbook spam