Never understood the theory behind intitle/inanchor/inurl etc.

I never quite understand the theory behind intitle, inurl and inanchor. So let say I am ranking dog training and I found out 10000 has that in title, 232 has them inurl and 42132 inanchor.. now what? What does that tell me about competition? Because i still have to go into software like market samurai to check their on-page or whatever, then into ahrefs to check their backlinks etc....

But yeah, what does intitle/inurl/inanchor has to do with them nowadays. All i have to know is how the top10 are performing, what they did, and how they do it. Who cares about how many has them in title?

I guess it gives you an idea how many of your competitors are doing their onpage properly. But you're right, it's not necessary. I usually just stick my keyword in quotes. If I like the number of results, I'll go for it. After analyzing the top ten and checking traffic volume of course.

It all means Restrict Search to Sites Where Query Words Appear. For examples:

allinanchor:
Example:
allinanchor:useful parenting sites
Means:
Search for pages that are called useful parenting sites by others.

inanchor:
Example:
restaurants Portland inanchor:kid-friendly
Means:
Search for pages on Portland restaurants for which links to the page say they are "kid friendly."

allintext:
Example:
allinanchor:useful parenting sites
Means:
Search for pages that are called useful parenting sites by others.

intext:
Example:
Dan Shugar intextowerlight
Means:
Find pages mentioning Dan Shugar where his company, Powerlight, is included in the text of the page, i.e., less likely to be from the corporate website.

allintitle:
Example:
allintitle: Google Advanced Operators
Means:
Search for pages with titles containing "Google," "Advanced,", and "Operators".

intitle:
Example:
movies comedy intitle:top ten
Means:
Search for pages with the words movie and comedy that include top ten in the title of the page.

inurl:
Example:
pharmaceutical inurl:investor
Means:
Search for pages in which the URL contains the word investor.

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It should now be easy to understand...
(Copy+pasted from a pdf as is to keep the original meaning intact )
HTH

Thanks srb888! This is not as much useful to assess competition as it is to find linking opportunities. Also, have a look here: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...gine-optimization-footprints-collections.html

If you have Market Samurai (you can have it easily for as long as you want, there is a BHW link on how to get it), you can also get the results of some of those search terms.

when i do keyword research i just use intitle and inurl with keyword in quote. That always give me nice results and keywords to target and rank easily. It just shows that n number of people are targeting the keyword which you are about to target

Just focus on the top 3 stable rankings for your keywords and these are your real competition.