Jeff Pela Subscribe to Jeff's articles (Visit Jeff's Website) Jeff Pela is a Search Engine Optimization expert based out of Union, New Jersey. He has over 8 years web design and SEO experience. He introduced Highline Technologies in 2003 to help businesses improve profits by establishing a web presence where needed, or enhance a company's current web presence. Jeff Pela is a Silver author on EvanCarmichael.com

Jeff Pela's Complete List Of SEO Articles Name Email If you enjoyed this article, get Jeff Pela's Complete List of SEO Articles For FREE! More Jeff Pela Link Building Methods Types of Links Research Your Keywords and Your Competition Well Designed Website SEO Education Why and How To Optimize Buying Text Links Know Your Limits and Your Competitors

The fastest and easiest way to gain information on your competition is to enter the keywords in which you intend to market into search engines and look for the results. First you want to search for a term, i.e. car wash (All examples are with Google). You should see a blue box indicating the number of total results found for that keyword. Next do the same search with quotation marks around the words; this is a more accurate search, because the quotation marks indicate that you are looking for that exact phrase. This technique give you an approximate idea about how many sites there are using this term within their website title or text. Although this is a good method to determine the total number of sites that are indexed on the web within your keyword, you are not competing against each of these sites, but more specifically the sites that are properly optimized.

The optimizer would want to look at the amount of pay per click (PPC) ads on the page, which gives an idea as to how much people are willing to spend on advertising for that keyword (the more PPC ads, the more people are willing to spend on advertising).

There are also many free tools which you can view the total number of searches per keyword, and also get suggestions of other keywords related to your specific search such as:
http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword/
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/keyword-suggestion-tool.html?
and https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Take all of this information into consideration when performing your research. Look for keywords that get a good number of monthly searches, but doesn't have in the hundred of millions in competition. Pay attention to the keywords and try and be as descriptive as possible, which usually helps with choosing a keyword/keyword phrase that will be better choice for your example. For example choose "shoe repair" instead of "shoes".

Research Your Keywords and Your Competition - To learn more about this author, visit Jeff Pela's Website.

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John Alexander John has taught keyword research and SEO skills to small groups of business owners and Webmasters from over 80 different countries world wide since 2002. John is also the Director of Search Engine Academy ; Co-director of Training at Search Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses at SEO Training Online and the SEO Workshop Resource Center. I look forward to hearing from you! - Visit John Alexander's Website

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