Julianna,

For the most part, yes, you're exactly right about the broad match.  You could research something like 'enjoy back flips' and find broad match has a gazillion searches and no competing sites.  People constantly search each individual word and all three, but no one actually searches the phrase, so phrase match would be low and probably is not worth chasing.

There may be a few sites that actually rank for the phrase, but who's searching for it? 

Hey Julianna,

I'm a little confused. I searched intitle:"hip-hop downloads" and got 862,000 results. That is very competitive.

You assess the value of a keyword based on it's search volume using phrase and/or exact match. You can also look at Google's ad competition and estimated CPC to get some what of an indicator of a keywords commercial value. But that applies less to music as there are so few of us marketing music in this way.

As for getting the keyword in your title, if you are trying to rank for the keyword then it is very important. To clarify... The reason you build a mini site as apposed to just writing an article is typically because the keyword is a little tougher to rank for than the average long tail keyword, but easier to rank for than a valuable first tier keyword like "music downloads" or something.

If the word is really easy to rank for then you can just write an article for it and put it either on your own site, or on a web 2.0 site line EZA or blogger. If it's tougher than that, that is where the mini site comes in. But you would probably never rank with just a mini site for a huge term with a lot of competition.

For example, there are a lot of keywords out there that are local keywords for which the root is still competitive. For example "carpet cleaning Seattle". I'm making a hypothetical example here but because "carpet cleaning is sooooo competitive, you would never rank unless you were a huge powerhouse site. And if you just wrote an article it would be tough as well because the primary domains of your competition would likely be so much more targeted than something like EZA. However, if you built a whole site around the keyword "carpet cleaning Seattle", you would stand a much better chance because the entire site wold so clearly be targeting the keyword and would have all of the appropriate footprints, even if it was only 5 or 10 pages deep.

Does that answer your question?

Yes, basically. An authority site is an "authority" because it is loaded with valuable content and is not something that some spammer can throw together. It's a trusted resource and leaves all of the usual footprints of an authority site ) low bounce rates, social activity, a lot of back links, a lot of content, etc).  It takes an authority site to rank for certain keywords. For example you would never rank for "credit cards" with some quickly thrown together site. Or "music downloads" for that matter.

However there are instances where you don't need an authority site but you do need more relevance, and a tad more authority, than just a simple article can offer. The local listings example I gave just above is a good example of that.

To relate that to music, (and this is just hypothetical), you might find that "acoustic guitar music" was a bit stiff and that by writing an article and adding it to your site or to a site like EZA doesn't quite cut it and you are not getting the ranking you hoped for. By buying a domain that was acousticguitarmusic.com and structuring the site to have all the appropriate title tags etc, you might find that this extra relevance takes you over the top and gets you the ranking you need. You can create a mini site in a day where as an authority site can take months or even years.

The other reason you might consider a mini site is because maybe you just want to test something without investing a ton of time. You could create a highly relevant mini site around a semi long tail keyword group and see how the traffic converted for you. If it did well you could then scale that up into a network of mini sites and/or an authority site.

There is no right or wrong way here. Just dueling strategies. Mini sites were much more popular a few years back but they still have there place.

Hey Julianna,

I think it was addressed in another thread but for anyone else reading, I think you were looking at the advertiser competition. Not the total number of sites when the keyword is searched in quotes. It is the latter that you want to do to analyze competition.

If you need a simpler strategy, what I would recommend is picking 1 single keyword that has at least 500 searches per day (15,000 per month) when you analyze in "phrase". Then make a list of every related term you can (not just hip hop music, hip hop download, hip hop lyrics, but RELATED terms as well such as gangster rap, rhythm and blues, etc), and start writing articles for each term regardless of competition. As long as you are creating good content, your site is reasonably structured with related terms and you are building links as outlined in the SEO training module, you should do pretty well. It's better to get laser targeted but if you are finding this confusing then simplify and remember that it's all about good content and backlinks.

Hi Julianna,

Yes, you can absolutely beat Amazon. I have on a number of occasions. If that wasn't the case then Amazon would be #1 for everything. But yes, the are a huge domain. Usually what you will see is that Amazon ranks for a product type phrase and that there are a lot of links to the home page but few to the ranking page. If you see a lot of links to the ranking page it becomes much tougher.

That is not to say that it's best when Amazon (or any other authority site) is not in the mix.

The "few links to the ranking page" example is a good example of the kind of thing a mini-site can often be used to beat. Just make sure you don't buy a domain with a trademark in it.

You might just spend a bit more time with the Market Samurai Tutorial videos. They explain everything pretty well. Once you have a handle on it, it should be really quick. I can get a read on something within a matter of minutes with MS, as compared to hours doing it manually. You'll get there.

Cool, they have quote a few on their website as well.