Many people believe that SEO is easy. Even though it sucks, all in all it’s nice news for me. The more people think SEO is is easy, the more and more guys are interested in SEO. That’s great, coz’ it creates demand for information about that issue. Simultaneously, it creates a crap. Yep, I mean all that hopeless voices that have a habit to spread false information about Search Engine Optimization in the whole web. Let’s say - there are many issues, some of them are ‘difficult‘. Like keyword density, for example. Here is an excerpt of post published by Shimon Sandler, self-named SEO expert. Shimon tries to describe keyword difficulty. Sadly he fails, but thanks to that I got great stuff for another post on my ambitious blog. Shimon describes Keyword Difficulty as a resultant of 6 points. In fact only one of them is true, but let’s list them at first. You know I love to comment. Ok, let’s go…
1) How many searches were conducted in the last 30 days.
Hmm… I dunno. Maybe it’s related to getting filtered and reliably going down on SERPs, but definitely it’s not good argument for keyword difficulty.
2) The Number of results that appear for that term in the Google’s results page.
It looks like ‘number of results‘ is the most popular crap of all internet forums. Take a look at that exemplary search and answer a simple question - do you really think that hitting 2059 is something difficult?
3) How many results appear for the term in an: allintitle: search
Similar situation. Orly orly?
4) How many results appear for the term for a: intitle/inanchor: search
Seriously? Ya, srsly srsly…
5) Inbound Link Profile strength of the top ten results for the term.
Yeah, that’s right. But if you don’t know anchor text of them, there is a chance that you fail your calculation, right?
6) Average PageRank of top ten results.
No. Google PageRank rating shows ‘link power’ of a page. That’s not related to single keyterms, just because it’s based on ALL links to single page. Definitely it doesn’t show power of links with single anchor text that you want to find out.
So how to estimate Keyword Difficulty?
It’s easy. Just do a recognition of competition on top ten resualts. Find out strong links with desirable anchor text of the top results sites for desirable keyterm. There are some tools that may help, but there is no reason to worry, in fact. Let’s say there are 3 sorts of keywords - easy (like ‘wordpress plugins‘?), middle (hmm… maybe ‘free forums‘?), and nightmare keywords (pop words like ‘ringtones‘, money making words like ‘casino‘). There’s still a question - how much you have to get for SEO from a customer. My response - it’s your own business, not mine. Need a tip? Just calculate, appreciate your work and don’t be a cheap SEO 
An addition - in looks like Shimon doesn’t practice what he preaches. Another SEO Consultant with no friendly URL’s on a ‘expert‘ weblog?
April 24th, 2007 #
Hi Florchakh,
You have some interesting posts on here now
Its difficult to write about SEO when you have no PR though, I am hoping to get mine up a bit at the next round, have to wait and see.
In terms of assessing competition, I just try and get a “feel” for the competitiveness vs the terms. Its quite easy to assess the competition and value of key terms using free tools and some simple observation, as you say, you dont need a complex algorithm.
Getting the back-links you need is always the hard part…. that’s the real art in it all…..
April 25th, 2007 #
Hi Jez, call me Bart
Why do you think that writing about SEO when you have no PR though is difficult? Maybe you don’t mull it over, but it’s so much more difficult to write about SEO in English when it is your second language. I’m sick about it every time when I write new post about ‘challenging’ issue
You are right. There are many things to write about, but everything counts on number of quality backlinks, in fact.
September 24th, 2007 #
Yes - some good points here. I think it’s really important to get to know your target niche and your competitors. You can find out a lot by simply looking at the backlinks a competitor has. You often find that the top 10 sites all have backlinks from the same places (because newcomers probably copied them). If you can get all the links a competitor has and then some more - you’ll most likely rank above them. Sounds easy eh? No
September 24th, 2007 #
Unless you have sufficient amount of money to spend on paid links, sponsored articles, directory entries & and points in some link exchange system, doesn’t it?
March 8th, 2008 #
SEO is easy as long as getting links is easy for you. Links are king!