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I bought a few facebook likes and it was a waste of money. Users who "liked" my page were fake... I wasn't expecting much from these likes and I did it because I wanted to make my brand new fb page more likeable. You need to start somewhere, right? No one wants to be the first person to "like".

I wouldn't pay anything. If you have good information to share people will post it for free.

I use SemRush for that. Simply type in competitor's url and see results for their traffic. See how much % traffic they are getting for each keyword compared to the total amount of traffic they are getting.

Hey Tanja,

I had the same question as you when I first got started here on SeoMoz... What does difficulty number mean? (me looks at Rand :P) There seems to be no explanation on here. So I had to ask myself is 40% high, what about 50%, 60%? In reality, these numbers don't mean much. The best way to assess competitivness of a keyword is to look at the chart shown below the difficulty score. In essence if you can match number of root domain backlinks/backlinks/authority as the number 1 guy then you have really good chance of ranking well (not always the case, but generally that holds true)...

Also, keep in mind that Google Adwords metrics is derived from paid ads, which very often doesn't necessary correlated with the difficulty of ranking organically.