Evaluate Keyword Competition to Increase Targeted Web Site Traffic

There are really only two questions you must ask yourself prior to keyword selection for your business: How many buyers are using the keyword phrases to find you? And how many other web pages are competing for the same keyword phrases? The most important of course is the keyword competition.

If the competition is too high it will take years for you to increase targeted web site traffic. Yet, with the right technique you can evaluate the competition upfront and know exactly how long it will be before you start seeing results.
The first step to evaluating your keyword phrases for competition is to type them into Google (or your search engine of choice) and see how many results come back. This number (at the top right of the search results) will tell you the number of competing web pages that have all of the words in your keyword phrase, but not necessarily in that particular order. At the same time you need to search each keyword phrase with quotation marks around it to find how many pages have that exact keyword phrase in them. (You will want to keep a spreadsheet of these results.)
These pages are not necessarily search engine optimized for the keyword you searched, so your actual keyword competition is much less. You should be able to out-perform most of them with proper SEO technique. However, Google is similar to Vegas in that you need to play the odds. There is a certain number of competing pages that would make the prospect of getting a first page Google ranking a very unlikely possibility.
Now, if you go by the exact, or phrase match, search in Google , page results of less than 10,000 will get you a relatively quick ranking so you can increase your targeted web site traffic in just a couple of months. You have to look at both numbers and make a judgment call, but if you have less than 10,000 pages competing with you for that exact phrase match these keyword phrases are a good bet!
You should run all of your potential keyword phrases through Google as described and then narrow them down with a couple of quick "sorts" in an excel spreadsheet.
You should have three columns of data as follows:
1 - the list of keyword phrases
2 - the number pages for the general search results for each keyword
3 - the number of pages for exact phrase match results
Simply highlight column 2 and click "sort by ascending order". (I will generally cut off the list at 1,000,000 search results, but it depends how many words are left. (If you don't have any with less search results you need to find some new keywords.)
Now highlight and sort by the third column in ascending order. Anything over 100,000 exact matches indicates highly competitive keyword competition.
You will want to narrow it down to the best 20 or less keyword phrases.
Keyword selection is part ‘Art' and part ‘Science'. And this is just one part of selecting keywords. You still must make sure these are the actual words your target audience is using to find you online, and that there are enough people searching these keywords to make it worthwhile for you to optimize your website for them.

If you've found this information helpful, but could use more instruction, I'm giving away a complete DVD tutorial on keyword selection that will increase targeted web site traffic for your business.

Shawn Hutchison is a full time internet marketer who specializes in keyword selection and ethical, sustainable, and free website traffic strategies.