Judging the Competitiveness of keywords

[DaveS]

Hello,More and more often I hear the word "competitive" used to describekeywords. Usually refering to Google's algorithm, penalties, orfilters.I am curious how you folks think Google judges the competitivenessof any certain keyword or phrase.Number of results returned for a search?Number of searches for that keyword?Money spent by sponsor sites to rank for that keyword? (adwords)Combination of these factors?What do you think?BompaI would think competativness would be judged on a combination of how many sites share keywords and how many searches are performed using those keywords.The more sites that have the same keywords (or share an industry) the more competetive that industry would be. Like any industry online or in real life.I wouldn't necessarily say that number of searches OR number of results is always a factor, but it is usually one OR the other OR a combination of both. Each circumstance can be unique.I personally would feel that one that has the most results would be most competitive, the majority of hte time, because I've seen many terms that are searched for a LOT but don't have a lot of results.I think it also depends in part on the quality of the other sites.No matter what industry you decide to have a crack at, without looking at what your long-established competitors are ALREADY doing, you really don't know what kind of competition you're facing - only you know your own abilities.Well, in the offline world, doesn't "very competitive" (market, industry, orniche), usually mean that there is more supply, (vendors), than there is demand, (searchers)?More sellers than buyers.How do we translate "supply" and "demand" into the web? We already know that not every page returned is a valid supplier.BompaIf you've got a phrase that has 10,000 searches per day, and there's 5,000,000 results, that would be a competitive search.If you've got another phrase that also gets 10,000 searches per day, but there's only 1,000 results, that's nowhere near as competitive, even though they both receive approximately the same number of searches.Yes, very competitive usually does mean more supply than demand - causing your competitors to do things they wouldn't ordinarily do, just to get the sale (which means you've got to respond in kind). That's competitive.But just high number of competing results doesn't make it too competitive. I've gotten #1 before for searches that have had 5,000,000 results (when I wasn't even concentrating on those phrases), but they're things that maybe 5 people a day search for.