Evaluating keywords demand/supply/competition

[deepavs]

I usually start looking for high demand keywords with overture keyword tool. My next step is to look how big is the competition in the google.

What do you think - if I want to be ranked for "red widgets" then should I make my decision based on the phrase without quotation marks (wide search) or the phrase with quotation marks?

Wide search gives me 174.000 competing pages & exact phrase gives me 32.000 pages.

If the exact phrase 1'st SERP page has pages with pagerank lower than 5 then I guess I have a possibility to get myself to the first page not too hard...or is this assumption wrong if at the same time the 1'st SERP of wide search has sites only with pagerank over 5?

Will optimizing for a narrower phrase beat the competitors who rank well because their high pagerank even thou they haven't optimized their pages for that specific phrase?

[mil2k]

Don't depend just on overture. Check those figures with wordtracker. Overture can be very misleading at times. Not That wordtracker is an authority but it certainly is better than Overture.

After that see the normal query search results. Check out the

allintitle:Keyword

and

allinanchor:Keyword

results

For the allintitle results analyse the top 10 results including PR. Now look at the normal results and analyze the top 10 PR. It will give you a brief overview of what work needs to be done to optimize your site.

While selecting Keyword try to balance between the Keyword words (ie 2 word or 3 word) and keyword frequency(the no of search query for that term). Sometimes the conversion ratios of 3 word Keyphrase is better than a one word Keyword.

If you playing in very competetive field than analyze all the backlinks in Alltheweb for the top 10 positions on google. Helps in your research. HTH :)