webninja

AMEN! Very well put beejeebers.

To the OP: Sounds like you don't know how to do basic research, or perhaps you just miss the good stuff? Here is what I do. Besides using google and regularly reading my favorite blogs I read forums like WF nearly every day.

There will always be a ton of noise but every now and then I will come across some very valuable info. Every time I find something really good I either save the html file, or paste the best parts into a plain text file, and give it a very descriptive name. I have a whole docs dir neatly categorized into hundreds of categories (started doing this some 15 years ago). That way finding quality info for future projects is quick and efficient:

find ~docs/comp/www/niches -type -f -name "*research*"

For example not too long ago I came across a thread here on WF which was exactly about what you are asking for now. There were two posts that were very good, so I pasted them into a text file and now found it for you:


"
I also analyze my competition for a given keyword like this:

1) Do a regular search on keyword and take note of the number of results. Less
than 5 mill. results is good, 5-10 mill. is decent. 10+ million can be
quite competitive.

2) Do another search on the same keyword, but this time with allinurl:keyword
Take note of how many results you get this time. I consider less than 3k
very good, and more than 10k very competitive.

3) Do a third search, this time with
allintitle:keyword
Take note of the number of results. Less than 70k is good, more than 100k
is competitive.

Of course, don't take my numbers here 100% literally as you should do some
testing for yourself in the niche and play around with different long-tail
and short-tail versions of the word. This will however give you indication
on what sort of competition you are facing for that keyword.

source: imagesAndWords (post on wickedfire.com)

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Doing your keyword research before even starting your site is a big aspect
for me, I sometimes take a week of work before deciding on creating the site,
this is because I spend the time to search and find those new niche areas
which are starting to bring in traffic but haven't peaked yet, this means
low competition and with a few creative link building strategies you can
score #1 and stay there before the bigger traffic surges come, here are a
few steps that you can do.

1) Think of a niche that has the potential to become hugely popular or at
least be popular enough to earn you some cash, think of one which will last
a longer period of time, I usually stay away for short term sites, when I
build a site I like to build it for the long term.

3) Once you find a niche think of the broadest keyword for that niche and
use keyword tools to help you find related keywords, build up a list of
keywords starting from the most popular (One that brings in the most amount
of traffic so far), write that down, then find 9 other keywords which bring
in less traffic then the main keyword. Another good tip to keep in mind here
is to try and have the main keyword name inside of the lesser keyword names,
so for instance if my main keyword is Cars then my lesser keywords in the
list should be something like Car Audio ect...

4) After that go to Google and Yahoo site explorer, two tabs in firefox is the
best, now start on your keyword list type in the first keyword into google,
so if my first keyword was cars I'd type that in and take a quick note of
how many results it returned, if the results are under 5 million then that is
good, as stated above over 10 million can get quite competitive, next take a
quick note of how many domains there are in the list, I'm not talking about
sites I'm talking about domains, to explain this better a domain in this term
would be "Buy New & Used Cars, Research Prices, Sell My Car, Find Auto Dealers"
[link to cars.com front page] and pages will be www.cars.com/caraudio.html the
more pages there are on the first page the better because this means the less
domains there are ranking for that term, everyone knows "Buy New & Used Cars,
Research Prices, Sell My Car, Find Auto Dealers" will be much harder to beat
then www.cars.com/caraudio.html

5) Now for each 10 sites in the search result type those into Yahoo's site
explorer and keep note of the amount of backlinks each site has, do this for
every single keyword in your list, once you get the backlink numbers for say
10 domains for your first keyword divide that by the number of sites you found
backlinks for so an example would be if I found out the number of backlinks
for 10 sites I'd add all those up and divide by 10, that way I can get a rough
idea of the amount of backlinks will be required for me to rank in the top 10.

6) Now go back to Google and for each keyword type in allintitle: Keyword
and allinurl: keyword this will give you how many sites have that keyword in
the title tags and in the url tags, you'll recieve extra points for having
that term in your title tag and in your URL so make sure its there if this
is your main keyword.

7) If the main keyword is fairly competitive don't start trying to rank for it
right away, first rank for a couple lower end keywords then build backlinks
for the main term, this will very your sites anchor text in the backlinks
and it will help you get into a better position for the main keyword take over.

8) Repeat over and over until you find a niche with the lowest competition and
the highest search volume, some will tell you none exsist but tell them they
are stupid and don't listen to them the internet evolves extremely quickly
and new niche markets are created every time something in life happens,
a new movies comes out, a new product is released, the apple Iphone hits
the market, ect..

9) Don't ask me how I do this because I've been doing this for so long it
just comes naturally to me now and I can do it very very quickly.

10) I hope all this crap makes sense to someone other then myself.

source: Aequitas (post on wickedfire.com)
"