Ultimately speaking, what determines if a keyword is difficult or hard to ran in the major search engiens is the quality of your competition. You can compete against every site in the internet, but if none of them are well optimized for that keyword then you can (most likely) easily outrank them. As such, it is important to know how to analyze the quality of competition for any particular keyword.
In order to determine the quality of competition for a particular keyword you will first need to do a search for that keyword on Google, Yahoo or MSN. You will then want to analyze the top 5 – 10 results in the search engines for the following factors such as:
- The quantity and quality of backlinks
- PageRank
- The age of the site
- The number of times the site is listed on del.icio.us, technorati, DMOZ, Bloglines, Wikipedia, and the Yahoo Directory
Three helpful tools for keyword research:
- SEO For Firefox by SEOBook
- PageStrength Tool by SEOMoz.org
- SEO Elite
