The Keyword Difficulty Myth: Keywords with high search result counts are difficult to rank for!

In the early days of the Internet it was common for marketers to decide how difficult it is to rank for a keyword by checking the number of search results in Google. If a keyword has a large number of search results, it was deemed a "high supply" keyword and hence difficult to rank for! There is even a   Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI for short) based on the keyword "suppy" counts and search volumes.

This method has long since lost its appeal.

Fact: The Web is Full of Junk Sites!

The search result count is no longer a factor that determines if it is easy or difficult to achieve top ranks for a keyword phrase because the web is full of junk sites created using automated tools.

The viability of ranking high for a keyword phrase is mostly based on how many high quality web pages are ranked in the search engines. Even for keywords that have millions of search results, there may be only a handful of quality web pages in the search engine results. The rest will be made up of junk automated pages or Made For Google Adsense pages.

Even if Google shows 3 million search results for a keyword the actual relevant, displayed results are mostly less than a thousand!

You can easily verify this by scrolling through the Google search result pages. After a few pages you will see a message like...

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 915 already displayed."

What this means is that, in many cases you can reach the top 30-50 places in search rankings with basic keyword optimization. The real competition comes after that. So, just high number of search engine results should never scare you off!

What is really important is a proper competition research and not a decision based on how many web pages are listed by a search engine in its search results!

Taken From: http://www.seolab.com/strategy/kwresults.php