Keywords Competition

How to Determine the Number of Competition for your Keywords 

When you type a keyword phrase into a search engine, the search engine will return pages containing that keyword phrase with the most relevant pages first. Some people make the mistake of taking the number of pages returned by the search engine as a measure of competition for that keyword phrase, but in reality it is not so and here is why:
Search engine results usually become irrelevant after 10-15 pages. In fact, you can easily outrank many pages by just doing some simple onpage optimization. This is because some of the pages just contain the keyword phrase in the content and the website owners are not even targeting it.
Your real competitors are webpages that have been optimized for that exact keyword phrase. This optimisation include both onpage and offpage optimization. In onpage optimization, the keyword will appear in the following locations:

1. Between the title tag: <title>Keyword Here</title>
2. In the page content
3. Between the header tags: h1 & h2. Eg <h1>Keyword Here</h1>
4. Bolded/italized/underlined texts
5. In the Meta tags
6. In alt tags for images

Pages that have the keywords at these strategic positions will likely rank higher. But on page optimization is not as important as off page optimization. There is a lot of things involve in off page optimization, but the most important is the anchor/link texts of back-links pointing to a page. Your main competitors are webpages that have the keyword phrase in the anchor texts of back links pointing to them. Now let's see how you can actually smoke out your competitors.
To determine our competition, we are going to filter out pages that have the keyword in their page title and in the anchor texts linking to them. To do this, simply type the following into Google's search box:
intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword
Simply replace "keyword" with the keyword you want to examine. For example if you're examining the keyword "affiliate marketing", the query is going to look like this:
intitle:affiliate inanchor:affiliate intitle: marketing inanchor: marketing
This query will return the exact number of pages containing the keywords in their page title and in the anchor/link texts linking to them. The number of pages will give you an idea of how competitive the keyword phrase is.
If you want your website to appear on the first page of the search result, then you have to analyze all the websites that appear on the first page. This analysis answers the following questions:

• How many websites are linking to the first 10 competitors?
• Does the keywords appear in the anchor texts of the back links pointing to my competitors?
• What is the Google page rank of each competing website?
• Does the keywords appear in the page title of those sites that link to my competitors?
• What is the Google page rank of the sites linking to my competitors?
• What is the IP Address of the websites linking to my competitors?

If you can answer all these questions and do a better optimization, then your website will appear on the first page of Google's search results for the keyword phrase you targeted. Doing this keyword analysis manually can be very stressful and time-consuming