I’m not going to argue for a second that backlinks are less important than titles. Backlinks count for 70-80% of a websites SEO.
The method I have mentioned in the post, is a way to do simple keyword research for newbies and to discover long-tail keyword phrases with little competition. It’s for quantity over quality in this case. Using the allintitle command will, like you say, most definitely not tell you everything you need to know for any keyword phrase.
What it does, is finding out which websites that have similar content as the one you want to rank for, and also who uses your keyword phrase in their titles.

So for low-competition long-tail keywords, it’s usually quite easy to rank a page or a blog post by only doing simple and effective on-page SEO, as well as an RSS submission and a few Web 2.0 submissions.
But you are right about using the PR as indicator, but I wouldn’t say it applies to all cases. If you check the backlinks of all the sites on the first page of google for that keyword, you might find that some of the sites only rank because of their authority and PR, which you will easily be able to rank for if you have the proper URL and titles, as well as a few relevant backlinks.
But I’m not an SEO guru, I’m just talking from my own experience =)

@ Preben Frenning:

Like I said, PR is a “rough” indicator of the strength of your competition. You need to check for consistency in the top ten results to really determine whether it accurately reflects what your up against. For instance, if the first few listings for a keyword are PR 0s and 1s, and the bottom 5 are all PR 4′s and 5′s, it is a safe assumption that the niche will be difficult to crack. In this scenario, the PR of the top results misrepresented the strength of the competition. When you have consistency in the top results, PR will spare you some research time, although it is still important to verify your findings using the Yahoo Site Explorer to run a backlink check.

Yes, titles are an important ranking factor, but let me tell you that backlinks outweigh all. Go to Google and search “click here.” You’ll pull up Adobe. They don’t have that term anywhere on the page. The sheer number of backlinks they have with the anchor “click here” has propelled them to the top.

In the entire scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter how many sites you have competing for the term. You could have 50 that are all .gov and .edu sites with healthy link profiles. Conversely, you could have 10 million results with very weak sites like Yahoo answers and Hubpages.
James@Nail varnish display stand´s last blog ..Where to Buy Nail Polish Display Rack

Thanks! I’m glad you like it =)

This way of doing keyword research is a great way to get started. Sure, it’s not foolproof, but if you do it a couple of times, I’m sure you will succeed.
Feel free to hit me up on preben@imarketingblog.org if you have any questions.

– Preben

I like the summary of 9 points, it really helps to break it down. Im new to the keyword stuff, and sometimes find it difficult to understand some articles…but this one was very easy and helpful.

Well, it does matter. Though you are right about analysing the top 10′s links etc. But their PR isn’t all. I have seen low PR outrank high PR sites many times before.
The reason I mention numbers, is that you can see how many pages are actually competing with you for that particular keyword phrase, which is why we use allintitle command in Google. – This is because titles are one very heavy factor in on-page SEO for google.

Try searcing for “tech house tracklist” in google. – It shows 5mill results, and I’m on the 3.rd spot. For that (my dj site), I have done very little SEO. I have only done some one-page optimization, as well as submitting the RSS feed to aggregators. A link from our twitter profile and facebook account is also present, but doesn’t have much impact.

Now try searching for “allintitle:tech house tracklist”. It shows 543 results. – Those are “competing” with me for those keywords.

It shouldn’t matter how many competing pages there are for a particular query. What you should be concerned with is how strong the first ten results are. Download “SEO for Firefox” so you can see what the PR is for the first 10 results. This should be a rough indicator of how strong they are. Alternatively, you can use the Yahoo site explorer to check the competition’s link profile.
James@Nail varnish display stand´s last blog ..Where to Buy Nail Polish Display Rack

the allinanchor: command is big. Because you can now start determining how did the site obtain their rankings is it on page or off page techniques?

cool info, really useful as i’m relatively new to this but need to learn and learn fast.

thanks, h
harry@unique gifts´s last blog ..Aston Martin vs. Lamborghini – Staffordshire

A great tool to optimise your online business is a web analytics provider such as clicktale to optimise your conversions. The analytics show you aggregate behaviours of your website as well as real time videos of their journey through your site. To top this off there are heatmaps of clicks, hovers, mouse and eye movements. So dont waste your money on SEO bringing people to your site unless you are going to employ an analytic provider to convert those shoppers to buyers!

Thank you =)