(Read Part 1, Long Tail Keyword Research)

At the end of the last article, I mentioned that while the number of search results found was an estimate of your keyword competition, it did not guarantee anything in terms of your competitors’ strength.

That’s because even though there may be very few competitors, it’s possible that the first page of Google is filled with very high authority sites. It won’t matter if there are even less than 100 search results; if the top 10 are strong, you won’t be able to break in easily.

Checking how strong your keyword competition is becomes a crucial part in choosing good, easy to dominate long tail keywords.

So, how do you gauge how strong your competitors are? You can check a variety of different factors, which include:

• Keyword in title? (Try allintitle:Keyword in Google to further narrow your competitor estimates)
• Page Rank
• Alexa Ranking
• Cached?
• Age
• Links pointing to page (general, .edu, .gov)
• In DMOZ and/or Yahoo Dir?
• On Page SEO

These are just some of the things you can factor in while evaluating a long tail keyword’s top 10 results. There are no set figures though to determine whether your competition is weak enough to easily dominate. This will be something you’ll have to test and experiment with by niche.

You’ll also have to decide whether you will analyze the top 10 for broad and/or phrase searches. Obviously you will have very different results. Let me give you an example.

I searched “Targeting Long Tail Keywords” as a broad and a phrase match, looking to find my last post in this mini series.

In the broad match, there were 1.4 million results, and on the front page there was some very strong competition; 3 pages were PR5, and most were from very popular sites that I knew about already. I am ranked #5 (for now, could be an initial spike).

In the phrase match, there are only 696 results, and while there is still a lot of strong competition, most of the sites I saw in the broad match aren’t as high since the specific keyword is not in their title. I’m ranked #2 here (beating the #1 from the broad search).

The way I look at it, the vast majority of people will NOT use phrase matches when searching, but it does give you an idea of what pages are specifically targeting this key phrase. I would look at both sets of results to get the best idea of what your up against. If you can see parallels and sites common to the two sets of results, you’ll have a better idea of what your stronger competition is. (Which hopefully, will not be strong at all!!)

Anyways, now for la piece de resistance. It would be a pretty big pain to go visit each of these sites for every long tail keyword you want to target and check out all these factors. There’s an amazing Firefox plugin that will get all of that data for you (except for OnPage SEO) and display it below the search results!

It’s called SEO for Firefox. You can read all about it and download it by clicking on that link. P.S. If you are not using Firefox, you are seriously missing out. Get Firefox Now!

It’s an amazing tool to speed up your keyword analysis, and will definitely help you find winning long tail keywords.

Here’s a screen shot of the data you can get right from the search results page:

I definitely recommend you get this tool, it will save you a lot of time and make your quest for #1 rankings a whole lot easier! Now find yourself a great long tail keyword, and make some easy profits!

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