How much do you care about KEI?

[sren]

I think I'll spend next saturday experimenting with the #*$! by paying the 1-day fee.
So I would like to see what more experimented webmasters are thinking about the KEI factor.
Do you care a lot about it?
Sure there're other factors like analyzing the top 10 sites for your keywords, but I noticed some people really doesen't look at KEI at all, and it's still an usefull factor for some other webmasters.

So guys, what do you think about it?

[aramyus]

Almost totally useless, because it is based on global results from a SE, and you are interested only in the top 10 or 20 results.

At best, it will help choose keywords where you rank 6000 instead of 150000

Personal opinion of course!

It is much more constructive to inspect the top 10 SE results.

There are a couple of much better indicators to measure how competitive a keyword is, for example:

Search google with allinurl:"Your keyphrase with quotes"
It gives you an idea of how many webmasters have tried to use this keyword in 'super optimized' pages

Search the KW in a SE and look at the top 10 results, then look if the pages listed are root url (eg www.mysite.com) or deeper pages (eg www.mysite.com/somepage)

There is also a good tool at seomoz.org that makes several similar calculations and gives you a composite index.

Remy

[Big_Ben]

I paid for the 1-day fee a while ago. It was pretty useful - they ended up giving me more than a 24 hour period of time.

KEI - well, its not more than an indication of what you *might* expect for competition. But it's nowhere near indicitave of how optimized those pages are for the keyterms. If you have a well-established authority site, new keywords would be easy... vs. if you have a brand new site, even getting some with a crazy high KEI might take some work.