KW competitiveness. Which is the best way?

[josiah7]

I've been seeing a lot of "gurus" claim top 10 rankings for certain search phrases in order to sell their training courses etc.

I'm going to use an example phrase a certain guru is touting to see what everyone thinks. EG: home based franchise income opportunities.

You see I have always thought that to determine the competitiveness of a keyword phrase you searched in Google like this:

intitle:"home based franchise income opportunities"

Because that brings back pages that have actually bothered to optimise for the KW.

But the gurus all seem to either use the broad phrase version to try and prove their point like:

home based franchise income opportunities

or the phrase match version like:

"home based franchise income opportunities"

Can anyone clarify what is the correct way to find the true competition for a keyword phrase?

Am I correct in using the "intitle" or not?

Thanks in advance.

Joe

[Gooner151078]

I think we are missing the point of SEO here, to improve your ranking on targeted keywords to improve fulfil the objectives of your site, whether it be transactional or simply a brand building campaign.

Intitle will show you who has that phrase in the title of their page which is beneficial to SEO but there are possibly hundreds of other equations to the ranking algorithm.

But your customers simply type the keyphrase into Google. This is certainly one of the best ways to evaluate competition. It is about seeing things as your customer would.

[JustinGoldberg]

read this:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:FJUKxTMxVk4J:www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-writing-useful-articles-that-readers-will-love/+site:www.mattcutts.com+default+linux+printer&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&client=firefox-a

[Marcia]

I've got my way which works and I've done it so long it's habit already (although I'm sure there added or other ways as well), but I dont think it can be 100% judged without actually taking an eyeball look at some of the sites out there with really good rankings and seeing what they're doing and how their sites look.

[josiah7]

OK folks thanks for the replies.

Joe

[SkyLite]

Or if you send articles to websites for linking purposes, then the more "competition" the better. So why worry about it?