experience with keyword difficulty tool?

[Geof]

Anybody has experience with keyword difficulty tools?
Are these tools reliable?
Which ones would you recommend?

[Randy Ray]

I don't put any stock into keyword difficulty tools, or most other SEO tools, for that matter.

[Mark]

I think you can get a good idea about how difficult a keyword is by the number of people trying to target the keywords in question. For instance, just typing in "online poker" in Google comes up with 32,800,000 results for that keyword. Typing in "credit cards" comes up with 163,000,000 results.

You can also see who is targeting the given keywords in the title of their pages by using "intitle:keyword" in Google. This can also give you a good idea about the competitiveness.

Mark

[themike537]

I like to use the SEO for Firefox tool. When you do a Google search it shows you each site's PR, Yahoo links, DMOZ links, Age, Google Cache date, and a ton of other information if you wish.

It's nice because you get all that info right on the search page without having to visit each site. Of course, you still have to know how to interpret all of that info to deem a keyword competitive or easy.

[Geof]

Of course, you still have to know how to interpret all of that info to deem a keyword competitive or easy.

I came across a sample report of a seomoz one here (although dated 2006).

Their analysis takes into account most of the criteria which themike and Mark suggest. I like the way they "rank" difficulty with their percentage scale. But again, Randy's right stating he's better off interpreting data with know-how.

[kingcobra]

There's no good tool here and actually the best indicator might be the amount of results returned as someone mentioned. However you also want to look at the amount of searches per month although they aren't always accurate. Another consideration is the quality of competition and that's the most important one in my mind. If I want to get on page 1 for a KW for instance I'll check out the sites there now and that can give you an idea of what you're up against, especially if you use something like IBP.

The best way to do this though bar none is to actually put the KW into play and see how things go. It doesn't take very long actually if your site is already established to get a real good feel about how well you can compete with this. Throw it in your meta stuff and if you don't have any KW presence on the page add a little, wait until the next crawl, and see where you're at. Then you can decide if you want to continue the experiment or not.