Best way to go hot on Sphinn - interview 35 sphinners :)

Asides of that it's still worth it.

Wordstream...

you missed a really obvious one.. and u missed an SEO with  a bachelor's in psyche..

lol..

LOL ultimate Sphinn bait?  Like my Twitter Tribute article - mentioning 65 Tweetheads got me 10x the normal visits to my blog.  Yet like that, this was still worth the effort to read and this resource clearly deserved the Sphinn :-)

still good info

No comments on that page. So sphinn gets the discussion ...

The only 'result' that really matters is that of your own site.

So you can find out all you like about the competition for a keyword but it doesn't mean that your site can or can't beat it. Or that you can convert any traffic if you do. For that you must have real traffic.

So you wait for real organic traffic or test with PPC.

PPC tells you if you can convert and if the traffic suggested by tools is real.

But only real organic traffic tells you what you want know about the competition - can your site beat it?

As soon as you have some organic traffic for a keyword, you know you can get more by performing better for that keyword and targeting the head and long tail of keywords that contain it (the keyword niche) ...

... target the head, exploit the tail.

That matches Larry's 'stop thinking about single keywords', Aaron's 'even if you don't rank for the core/root keyword' point and it's exactly what Ian Lurie has said.

Whilst waiting for real traffic, a quick check for strong competition is to find out how many sites have both the keyword in their title tag and in the text of inbound links. Do that using the untouchable MajesticSEO database and you have yourself a powerful metric. Wordtracker will do this for 1000s of words a time.

If you have more time then you only really care about the sites you have to beat and that's the top 10. But do remember that you don't need to get top 10 for the core/root keyword (see Aaron Ian and Larry's points) so don't check out the top few sites, check out those at 8th, 9th and 10th.

Not our fault the Sphinn community’s home to so many thought leaders J.

Steve and Alan: if you guys are game we’d love to have both of you contribute next time around.

Nunney: Great point, and as Larry's answer reflects that's definitely part of our core philosophy and the way that we built our products.

HUGE thanks to everyone who participated: as people have said above regardless of how active the contributors are on Sphinn everyone taking a few minutes to offer their insights/advice made for a really great resource. Thanks everyone!

Tom