How makes that sense? - broad match, phrase match, etc.

hey guys.

I'm a newbie in SEO and want to learn how to create websites in a good niche where are not many competitors.
So I've read in many ebooks that I have to search in google for phrase match keywords to determine which keywords have a lot of competition and which have less competition.

So let's say I search for the phrase match "how to lose weight in 3 months" I get only 414 results.. So this might be a very good keyword because there's almost no competition. right?

but if I search for the broad match of "how to lose weight in 3 months" then I get over 50 millions of results.. So i never make it to the first page.

So my question how does this make sense?
If I make a website and optimize it for the keyword "how to lose weight in 3 months" I probably would do very well for the phrase match.
But who in the world searches a keyword in phrase match ?!

Please tell me how this works

Good question but I do not know the answer. With quotes the competition is low. Without quotes the competition is higher. Why? And g009le doesn't necessarily use the title tag for ranking or strickly for displaying SE results to surfers. Sometimes what you write in the body of the page is what gets displayed to the surfer doing the search. Plus there are other factors like 3rd party links to you. Hopefully a guru answers this question.

The competition for the broad match phrase does count. This is one of the convenient little pieces of info that the gurus downplay when telling you about phrase match results and how easy it is to beat the competition. When you do the phrase match compare the listings to the broad match results. Often they are completely different.

If the first page of Google that has 50 million results is dominated by authority sites your website may have a really hard time ever seeing daylight even if you do perfectly optimize it. An authority site doesn't have to be well optimized to easily outrank your highly optimized website for your keyword.

Now, this isn't always the case because I have frequently outranked authority sites, but as a general rule, if the first page of results is clogged with high PR websites, you may have to work really hard to break into the top ten. Use Yahoo to see how many backlinks are pointing to the pages you are trying to beat. If there are zero to just a few backlinks pointing to those page, you have a chance. If there are dozens to hundreds, well then you have your work cut out for you.

thanks for the fast replies!

but what is the general rule?
How many results may my keywords have with the broad match when I want to rank in the first page?
When does it get harder and when is it almost impossible for a newbie like me?

It doesn't matter how many results there are. What matters are the number of backlinks pointing to each individual page listed in the top ten results. If those pages have few to no links pointing to them then it may be yours for the taking. If there are a large number of backlinks (internal and external) then you are probably going to have to build a greater number of backlinks to your page to out rank them. Even then, that doesn't mean you will beat out well known authority websites.

check if you see web2.0 properties in the top10, if you see those... competition is doable.

If you find alot of authority websites in the top10, think about wikipedia, amazon, ebay, google, .edu, .gov sites.. competition is to high.

cool thanks a lot, you guys helped me !

"Guru's" who promote the use of article marketing will say that if you find a keyword in quotes with less than 5000 search results it is easy to get on the first page of google, by sending articles to ezinearticles. You could also do the same with video marketing. Your link however is not a direct link to your site but to ezinearticles or the video site. Nonetheless it will still get you some traffic.

I think your strategy is correct. phrase match is better than broad match.

Got to know a lot from the second answer, Nice one bro.