Intitle Command for Keyword Research
Using the intitle command for keyword research
Once you've done your keyword brainstorming and got an idea of the amount of traffic particular keywords are attracting, you need to know how much competition there is for a that keyword or phrase. We can do this by using the intitle command
You can then decide whether or not that particular keyword is worth pursuing.
When you do a search in Google or any other search engine, as well as returning the results you are looking for, you also get the number of competing sites for that particular phrase.
In our example we did a search for Search Engine Optimisation which returned a result of 117,000,000, if we wrap our search query in "" marks to make it an exact match we get 11,000,000. This gives us an idea of the number of competing sites for broad and exact match queries.
Using the intitle command to narrow down the competition
The title tag, is an important tag for SEO. Whatever is written in the title tag tells us what that page is about. It's also used by Google and other search engines as the link to your page. More importantly any keywords found in the title tag are made bold in the search results
It also gives us a good indication of whether or not that site is optimising for a particular search term properly.
To see how many sites are using a keyword in the title tag we perform the following search;
Intitle:Keyword
So in our search we type - intitle:Search Engine Optimisation
This results in 13,800,000 websites with it in the title tag for broad match.
Although these numbers are huge, this is still significantly lower than the 117,000,000 the first result produced.
Next we repeat for exact match;
Intitle:"Search Engine Optimisation" - this gives us 634,000 - that's down from 11,000,000
As you can see these numbers are significantly smaller than our original search and give us a very good indication of the competition for a particular keyword.
Depending on your area of business these numbers can be very small especially if you are chasing long tail keywords.
Want to learn more about SEO? Check out our article on 5 top free SEO tools