Do you use "keyword" or keyword when checking SE competition?

Hey everyone!

I always uses "keyword" to find SE competition for a keyword, but I have been hearing a lot about people saying it is not right. Their explaination - no one searches with qoutes (""), but as what I know, using quotes we'll see true webpages competing for that particular keyword.

What's your view on this matter?

When people search for something as LONG TAIL KEYWORD1, google ranks the page with "LONG TAIL KEYWORD" above the page with "BLA-BLA LONG TAIL BLA BLA KEYWORD"

so its logical to using quote to get actual competition is the correct way...

Superb both of you answered my question perfectly! Thanks!

It depends what information you're looking for:

without quotes -- gives you what the searcher sees
"with quotes" -- gives you what pages are competing for the keyword as a phrase

Without quotes and with quotes should give you an idea how strong the competition is. If you search without quotes and see very few matches for the quoted keyword in the top ten, it means that your competition for the "quoted" match is quite weak.

You want then to go back and look at the backlinks of the top ten that appear for the quoted keywords and pay attention to the following (in order of priority):

* How many backlinks does the page have (more == better)
* What percentage of these backlinks have anchor text containing or exactly matching your keyword (higher percentage == better)
* What is the PR of the page
* What is the PR of the page on which the backlink appears
* Is the page on which the backlink appears relevant to the page to which the backlink points?

There's probably a lot of other factors that influence google's decisions, so this list is for sure incomplete.

I usually compare the top 10 results with quotes vs without quotes to see which sites are different. It is true no one uses quotes for searches. After you find a long tail keyword you like you want to place 1st or as close as you can to 1st on the serp without quotes. I hope this makes sense...

@AffGuy08: you might also want to use allintitle:your keyword to check out your competition.

FleshJoe wrote an excellent post on sizing up a niche that would be worth your while to read, here's the link to it:

I'm very new to SEO and having trouble understanding one of the basics of keyword reseach. Seems most people use search results for "your keyphrase" or allintitle:your keyphrase to measure how hard it will be to rank for your keyphrase. I dont understand why this is a better measure than using your keyphrase, since what people are going to be typing in is your keyphrase without quotes. Surely since thats what we want to rank for, thats what we should be looking at? Where am i wrong here?

Just as an example i was reasearching one long tail keyphrase and had wildly varying results for allintitle and just the naked phrase. Just going by the allintitle phrase it looked great, very low competition for the entire phrase. However searching just the keyphrase on its own returned a high number of authority sites at the top of the rankings that i could never hope to beat.