SERP Competition

Previously, I regarded first SERP back link profiles as the primary way to judge the competition for a given keyword. Sometimes, more in depth research may be a good idea. Tools like the SEO for firefox plug-in will help provide other data about competing sites. This may include PageRank, Alexa rank, cache date, and positions in other search engines. If an optimizer is having trouble deciding between a few keywords, he could take into account all of this information to select the least competitive terms. Though perhaps added search volume or relevance is worth a little more competition.