Trying to size up Comp, have some q's:

Hey BHW--first thread so I must say that I wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far as I have without you guys... so many thanks!

A few weeks ago in an effort to learn how to do proper keyword research, I acquired Market Samurai and plenty of tutorials to go with it. After watching and reading plenty about the program (and playing with it a bit myself) I found some keywords that i thought looked promising. However, while trying to size up my competition in G's top 10, I quickly realized that there must be a lot of core knowledge that has been left out of every training material I used.

For example, all the information I can find will tell me all about what factors are important for SEO and ranking (ie DA, PR, Backlinks, Title info, etc) but not give any information as to how things are weighted or any examples or scenarios.

Thus I grabbed "The Art of SEO" from these boards and am now about half-way through it. While I feel that I can grasp each concept a bit better now, I still have some aching questions that I want to throw your way.

Here's an example of the SEO Comp for a keyword i brought up in MS, which reports:

24 exact searches a day
$2.05 Adwords CPC
16,000 SEO Comp
2,100 Title Comp

Question: Are the above stats for a keyword decent enough to start a small adwords information site? (.org and .net exact keyword matches are available)

Obviously the on page SEO factors in the below example are great, and at least from the 3rd one down, the page backlinks aren't too numerous either.

Question: How important is the fact that .edu and .gov take spots 4 and 5? Will that simple fact make them damn near impossible to replace?

Question: You can see that the Domain Age and PR of all listed are quite high, is that enough to make the lack of on page SEO factors irrelevant?

Question: This keyword search in Gxxgle also returns 1 news listing and 3 .pdf listings. Are .pdf documents (or others) easily replaced? Are news listings impossible to replace? (because of google's diversification of search resluts)




I really appreciate any insight you guys can give me... I'm really trying to learn this stuff, and i'll bet you can save me from a couple mistakes.

Thanks,

Chocko

Totally worth going for, especially if there's a specific news article that doesn't really use the keywords.

Heres a tip though - Use wordpress for this. Google regards a wordpress blog similar to a news site. They both update information as it happens. If you have the newer post, good links and good keyword usage, the only thing holding you back are the two things you can't control: PR and Domain Age.

moronic_kaos said:

Totally worth going for, especially if there's a specific news article that doesn't really use the keywords.

Heres a tip though - Use wordpress for this. Google regards a wordpress blog similar to a news site. They both update information as it happens. If you have the newer post, good links and good keyword usage, the only thing holding you back are the two things you can't control: PR and Domain Age.

Click to expand...

moronic_kaos, thanks for the tip. I'll definitely go that route and try to nab the news slot on the top 10 too.

I'm still trying to find answers to the other questions i've posed up above, if anyone cares to share some knowledge with me.

Thanks,

Chocko

Hmm another bump? I don't think i'm asking questions that are going to give away anyone's secret or anything... mabye these are actually hard questions?

Question: Are the above stats for a keyword decent enough to start a small adwords information site? (.org and .net exact keyword matches are available)

Question: How important is the fact that .edu and .gov take spots 3 - 5? Will that simple fact make them damn near impossible to replace?

Question: You can see that the Domain Age and PR of all listed are quite high, is that enough to make the lack of on page SEO factors irrelevant?

Question: This keyword search in Gxxgle also returns 1 news listing and 3 .pdf listings (these pdf's are on .gov and .edu domains). Are .pdf documents (or other kinds of documents) easily replaced? Or does that simply depend on the domain they're on?

Are news listings impossible to replace? (because of google's diversification of search resluts)

---

Hopefully someone out there has some insight on this, 'cause the only way i can see someone knowing these answers is though trial and error... save me some errors will ya?? <3

Thanks