Step 2: Analyzing Keyword Phrases

The second step is analyzing your keyword phrases. This involves analyzing the competition for the search terms, i.e. how many pages are indexed in a search engine like Google. This gives you an idea of how many pages are competing for the top spot. While most of the time, the optimized sites are ranking high, very often un- Optimized sites show up highly ranked due to the complex nature of the search engine algorithms. It is therefore wise to be conscious of the extent of competition.

PageRank

The potential for ranking with a particular keyword depends on several factors. The on-page factors address your optimization efforts while the off-page factors like PageRank affect ranking in a major way. While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the affect and weight of all the factors, your site’s PageRank is an important parameter in keyword analysis. Thumb rule is that the higher your site’s PageRank, the better the chance of ranking with highly competitive keywords. Choose your keywords keeping your site’s PageRank in mind. For more information, read our detailed article on Google PageRank Algorithm

Adding Information and Measuring Competition for Keywords

After you have made your search on Wordtracker or Overture, and short-listed your key phrases, you need to collect information about their competition as described above. Wordtracker offers an in-built tool to find the number of pages for your keywords indexed in Google.

Alternately, you can check the competition for your keywords at:
http://www.seorank.com/search-engine-keyword-competition.php

Based on our experience with search engines, the table below suggests a guideline for choosing keyword based on the competition of pages indexed in search engines. For instance, if your site has a PR value of 7/10 on Google Toolbar, you can expect to beat four million existing web pages and rank well for your search term, whereas, with a PR value of 3, you can expect to top upto five hundred thousand web pages for the same search term.

PageRank (PR)   Good for Competition (Number of web pages on Google)
PR0                   Upto 30,000 web pages on Google
PR1                   Upto 1,00,000 web pages on Google
PR2                   Upto 3,50,000 web pages on Google
PR3                   Upto 5,00,000 web pages on Google
PR4                   Upto 7,00,000 web pages on Google
PR5                   Upto 1,000,000 web pages on Google
PR6                   Upto 2,000,000 web pages on Google
PR7                   Upto 4,000,000 web pages on Google

While the above table is not a hard rule as we have seen large variation in several cases. The numbers assure that you would do a fairly good job of your site optimization. 

Note: An alternative to the above table is to manually check the PageRank of the first few sites appearing in the SERP of Google for your selected Keyword Phrases. If the first 
few sites have PR rankings from PR5- PR6, then it is safe to assume that your site/web pages need at least this PR value to compete for the Keyword Phrase selection.

In order to make this task more organized, we recommend making use of Excel Sheets to feed in all the data you have compiled. This will allow you to make comparisons between various search terms and at the same time, do away with all the unrelated junk terms that are irrelevant to your site and also the ones that exceed your site’s PR requirement.