You will be able to better understand the basics of your keyword selection tasks if you keep in mind how Web surfers usually enter their queries and what results they expect back.

Most engines will offer you advanced search options. It is important for us to consider the possibility of constraining the search to an exact match with the help of double quotes. Thus, if you type in the search box Free Marketing Newsletter you will get around 8,000,000 results as competition. These are the pages that randomly contain the words "Free", "Marketing" and "Newsletter", in various combinations.

However, should you query for "Free Marketing Newsletter" (with quotes) your search returns only about 18,000 results, containing the exact phrase Free Marketing Newsletter.

Remember that as a rule, the overwhelming majority of Web surfers search without quotes. They are either unaware of this possibility, forget about it, or don't use it intentionally.

However, most targeted customers do use quotes. When someone is serious about finding a Free Marketing Newsletter, he or she will most probably get frustrated by 8 million results. A serious web surfer learns to restrict the search to the exact match.

Some SEO softwares Keyword Suggestion Tool works the same way. You may restrict it to the exact match or let it return the total number of sites competing for any combination of words in your keyphrase. The "Competition" number displayed for the two variants may differ significantly. It's up to you to decide which one to use. Our advice is that you should follow a targeted visitor's behavior - figure out whether your visitor will be conducting an exact search when seriously looking to purchase your product, or whether they'll be satisfied with the results of the inexact search.

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