Advice on keyword research

[Ninety9media]

I'm pretty much a noob at IM. I'm going to work on some micro niche sites, now I know I should look for a keyword that gets at least 3000 searches a month and that adwords pays more than a dollar
But what I'm not sure is how to gauge the strength of the competitors.
Are there any tools and techniques that I can use to see if I have any chance of getting to 1 on G? How can I see why the top sites are at the top? And how do I know if I have a chance to rank there?

 

[Debugger]

Yes there are tools traffic travis(google it),piwik...etc...google adword keyword tool

 

[AnotherIdol]

You can get a "free" version of Traffic Travis. That will analyse the top sites for you and your keyword and give you a difficulty level. You will probably want to look for easy - medium keywords.

 

[gguru]

I recommend the same Traffic Travis and select Long tail keywords for ranking

 

[cruzino]

For strength of competitors, check out Majestic SEO or SEOMoz Pro, both paid services but have a lot of info on competitors backlinks. It just depends on your budget, as these services are not cheap.

 

[Larry195]

use Traffic Travis, its very good and free
can't go wrong with it

 

[Dj Co2]

Get a Market Samurai trial version from this link

http://marketsamurai.com/thirtydc

 

[JMamba]

Why don't you just use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool? Set your keyword to exact match and make sure you check the box that says "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms".

When you get your results, you should have a column labeled "Competition" which will tell you if you keyword has high, medium, or low competition. If you don't see this column, you have to make it active by clicking on the columns tab at the far right and check the box for "Competition".

What you should do next is use the allintitle: search operator in Google by putting this in the search box: allintitle:your keyword. You can see how many competitors you have in your space that's trying to optimize for the same keyword. So the lower the number the better.

Then go over to MajesticSEO and find out how many referring domains the site currently in the first position of the SERPs has total. You want to either beat the total number of referring domains, meaning have more different C Class IPs pointing to your site, or have higher quality backlinks. Vary your backlink portfolio using diff high PR blog networks that you can find here and make sure you use different anchor texts.

 

[Bubba]

I'm pretty much a noob at IM. I'm going to work on some micro niche sites, now I know I should look for a keyword that gets at least 3000 searches a month and that adwords pays more than a dollar
But what I'm not sure is how to gauge the strength of the competitors.
Are there any tools and techniques that I can use to see if I have any chance of getting to 1 on G? How can I see why the top sites are at the top? And how do I know if I have a chance to rank there?

You should check out this thread:

http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/white-hat-seo/333317-keyword-research-btb-way.html

It really opened my eyes regarding keyword research and changed how I go about it.

 

[maggie1982]

this is great for .....

 

[dotcomdesigns]

Why don't you just use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool? Set your keyword to exact match and make sure you check the box that says "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms".

When you get your results, you should have a column labeled "Competition" which will tell you if you keyword has high, medium, or low competition. If you don't see this column, you have to make it active by clicking on the columns tab at the far right and check the box for "Competition".

What you should do next is use the allintitle: search operator in Google by putting this in the search box: allintitle:your keyword. You can see how many competitors you have in your space that's trying to optimize for the same keyword. So the lower the number the better.

Then go over to MajesticSEO and find out how many referring domains the site currently in the first position of the SERPs has total. You want to either beat the total number of referring domains, meaning have more different C Class IPs pointing to your site, or have higher quality backlinks. Vary your backlink portfolio using diff high PR blog networks that you can find here and make sure you use different anchor texts.

The competition column in Adwords is for advertiser competition. It relates to how many websites are bidding on that keyword and the cost of it.

It has NOTHING to do with competition results in the organic results. I hope you haven't been using that for too long!

 

[Ninety9media]

Good advice here, thanks everyone.
I'm downloading traffic travis now

 

[Ark_Bill]

According to me, use google adwords keyword research tool.

 

[Esolutions1]

Plz.go in google adword keyword tool and find keywords on your requirement...then you can start to create MNS site ....and do SEO....Good Luck

 

[nome33]

I use SERP Attack Pro. Works well and is not too expensive.