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This is one of these questions where the answer is “it depends”!

When you are choosing a keyword phrase to optimize the main page of your website for you should always as the question “is this keyword phrase too competitive”? Being on page 10 of the search engine results aint gonna do you much good, so you need to be sure that you can climb above your competition and get that higher search engine rank.

The “competing pages” statistic in Wordtracker will act as a good guide for you, but you need to go further than this.

Here is what I do:

(1) I use the “competing pages” as a quick guideline for me to narrow down my keyword list

(2) The important part - I choose a potential keyword, then I go to Google and I type in that keyword exactly as it is (without quotes). I then look at the websites that are on the top of page 1 and page 2 of Google and ask myself the following question:

Can I beat this website?

By this I mean, is this a website that has so many backlinks that I am never going to get anywhere near it? Or is it an authority or big company website (e.g. Microsoft) with so many staff working to promote it that I will never get anywhere near it?

I usually use http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ to check the backlinks of these site.

If you do this, then hopefully you will be able to answer this question, which boils down to “have you got enough time to build more/better quality backlinks than this website”? It really all depends on you, your experience and how much time or money you have available!

Of course, there are other factors as well, but this one is the biggest factor when it comes to ranking well in Google.