Researching possible niche markets

[Jason Christensen]

My name is Jason and I have been researching possible niche markets to enter. I have been following the steps from Ken Envoys information to research ideas and compare demand vs competition. I would like to get some feedback regarding my findings:

I found a 3 word phrase keyword that is searched for 61200 times according to overture. I did a google search for the same phrase enclosed in quotes and it returned 48000 sites. Does this seem like a good ratio to any of you experts? Compared to some of my other ideas it seems good to me but what do I know.

Thank you for any suggestions you might have.

[Jason Christensen]

I forgot something, when I enter my keyword phrase in without qoutes i receive over 10 million results.

[Lynn Terry]

Hi Jason & Welcome

The number of results doesnt really matter - you're only going to be competing with the top 10 results (you DO want to be listed on the first page of the results, after all). So analyze those, and forget the rest.

As for your numbers, that sounds to me like somewhat of a general phrase. Is it? Is there a tighter niche in there somewhere you might target? Or lots of sub-niches you will also target on the same website you are creating?

[Jason Christensen]

Lynn,

I am planning on addressing many smaller niches inside of my main keyword phrase, the stats are for the main phrase which is a sub of a veeeery large keyword. When I pull up the websites located on the first page it does not look like they are optimized or even use meta tags for keywords (I know there are other ways to address keywords). I think I have a decent chance of competing but again only been at this for a month or two still learning. (So much to learn)

I also would like to know if when you do a google search to look at competition, do you enclose the keyword in quotes?

Thank you for the information you have already supplied, hopefully when I learn somemore I can contribute to this great forum.

[Lynn Terry]

I dont usually use quotes, no - I have to imagine most of my searchers wont, so I want to analyze the results without.

I get what you're saying about it being a more general niche - and thats all fine and good. I'm all for large content sites, myself You will want to choose a good keyword phrase for each category and your internal pages as well - to get rankings across your entire site (great way to get solid traffic numbers).

At the current time, the most important factor is how many inbound links those other sites have. So you want to look at the top 10 that come up for your keyword phrase... and analyze their inbound links. Not only how many, but how good they are too (quality).

I did a 3-part series a while back on creating affiliate sites - this second part has what you are looking for I believe: http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/a ... 122104.htm . Check that out and let me know if that helps. It talks about researching backward links (among other things).

(backward links and inbound links - same thing)