Keyword Analysis Advanced Tools To Supercharge Your Search Engine Results

If you’ve been in online business for anytime you’ve heard about the importance of keyword research. 

You’ve probably heard that selecting the right keywords can greatly impact your sites ability to rank in the organic search engine results and get substantial traffic to your website.  With organic search engine traffic being one of the highest converting types of traffic, it is important you get an edge over your competition with your keyword research.

Your objective is to find keywords that have good search volumes that will require the least amount of work possible to beat the competition for ranking in the top 10 of the search results.

Currently, you may be using Google phrase match to measure your competition.  Phrase match simply means you measure the competitive search results in Google with quotations around the keyword when you search. 

When you search with phrase match, Google returns only sites that have the exact phrase.  So if you search for “dog food”, Google will return all the sites with the word dog food in it, but not sites with phrases like food for dogs or premium food for your dog.

Phrase match queries are a decent concept for measuring competition, but they become really powerful when combined with advanced query operators like intitle: and inanchor:.

We know from search engine optimization that it is highly important to optimize your title tag for a given keyword if you want a page to rank for that keyword.  Therefore, when measuring competition it can be assumed that sites that have a given keyword in their title tag are more likely to be optimizing for the keyword.

By using the intitle: advance query operator with phrase match (quotation marks) you can gain a very good idea of the number of competing sites that are optimizing for a giving keyword.  For instance, if you type in the Google Search query intitle:”dog food”, the number of returned results will show you how many sites have the word dog food in the title of the page.  This is a great indication of the level of competition that is optimizing for this keyword.

Next, after you have the total competition for a keyword using the intitle: search query, you can take it one step further by measuring the keywords inanchor: competition.  The query operator inanchor: will tell you how many sites have a given keyword in the anchor/ incoming links to the page. 

Since incoming links with a keyword in the anchored text is of significant importance for search engine ranking you have just taken one more giant step in measuring the competition for the keyword.  One note, when you are doing the inanchor: query, I advise using quotations around the keyword so you get a phrase match.

As an even more powerful tool you can combine the intitle: and inanchor: when searching the competitiveness of a keyword.  So in the Google search box you would have a query for intitle:”your keyword” + inanchor:”your keyword”.  This will tell you how many sites have a title tag with the chosen keyword and incoming links with the keyword.  This is a very focused way to quickly measure the number of sites optimizing for your keywords.

By taking each keyword and recording the search volume, intitle competition, and inanchor competition you can really focus on finding the keywords that will provide you the easiest path for ranking in the top 10.  The nice thing about this method is that it is an easy way to work though thousands of keywords and focus you on the ones that offer the best opportunity to optimize your site for.

Tags: Keyword analysis, Keyword Research, keyword search, keyword tools, search engine optimization, SEO