Dan Thies writes a very interesting article about Keyword Competition Metrics where he analyses how you can define the level of competition for a search term. Dan looks primarily at three types of competition data:

• How many sites/pages are competing?
• How well linked are the top ranked sites?
• How much are people paying for PPC traffic?

The number of results given by Google for the query is a bad estimation of competitivity. Dan suggests to search for intitle:search inanchor:search instead, because your competitors may use the keywords in the title and in the anchor texts.

Orion has also posted a good post on SEW forums about Keyword Competitiveness. He points out that keyword competitiveness means different things for different people:

• Some have stated that search results is a measure of keyword competitiveness (KC).
• Others argue whether or not the search volume from Overture or WordTracker is a fair indicator of keyword competitiveness.
• Many claim that the search results from Google combined with the keyword volume from Overture provides a better estimate of the competitiveness of a term or phrase(s).
• Even others use a composite metric from keyword tracking tools coming from dissimilar meta engines. This is equivalent to combining dissimilar analytics and business intelligence metrics from dissimilar media outlets.

Interesting subject, stay tuned as we'll talk about it on that blog in the future.

Is Google using Latent Semantic Indexing? Read the last Axandra's newsletter to better understand how Google could be giving more weight to latent semantic indexing (LSI) in its latest ranking algorithm update:

• What is latent semantic indexing?
• Why is this important to your SEO activities?
• Where can I find further information about LSI?

Latent semantic indexing helps search engines to find out what a web page is all about. It basically means to you that you shouldn't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your web pages and when getting links.

The web pages on your web site should be related and focus mainly on a special topic while using different words that describe the topic. Use variations of your keyword and synonyms. That makes it easier for search engines to determine the topic of your site.

Via

More info on SEO News Agregator

Check out Xan Porter's very good overview of ranking algorithms:

• Bradford's law (1934)
• ZIPF's law (1949)
• Heaps' law (1978)
• PageRank ( Brin, Page, 1998)
• HITS (Kleinberg, 1998)