Perhaps the most important part of keyword research is checking out the competition. If you are going up against a bunch of PR6 10 year old domains you might have a big fight on your hands and it makes sense to know this ahead of time so you can judge whether or not it is worth your time and money to take on the keyword.
While I firmly believe that the best way to do this is to do a search for your phrase (without quotes) and then check out the top 10 in Google there are a couple of other things you might do to find out how many other people are optimizing for that keyword.
The 3 main things you want to check is if the keyword phrase is in the url, the title and how many anchor text. You can do this by using things called “operators” in the google search bar. These operators are allinurl: allintitle: and allinanchor:.
You use these operators in conjunction with your keyword phrase, so if your keyword phrase was “dog training” and you wanted to see how how many other pages had this in the url, you would type the following in the google search bar:
Allinurl:”dog training”
If you want to see how many pages have “dog training” in the title type:
Allintitle:”dog training”
And to see how many pages have the keyword phrase “dog training” in anchor text pointing to the page, type:
Allinurl:”dog training”
This last one, I think is particularly important because it indicates that these pages are actively being optimized for the keyword as opposed to search terms that just come up for the keyword and are not optimized. The reason I think it is important is because if you optimize your back links for the keyword phrase in anchor text, you may be able to beat out a stronger site that does not have that keyword in anchor text pointing back to it.
There’s actually a lot of search operators you can use in Google to find stuff and do research – if you want to find out about more of them, check out this site:
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#allinanchor
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