How Effective Is KEI for SEO?

Keyword Effectiveness Indicator (KEI) is touted by many professional SEOs as a method to identify the right keywords to get ranked for a page. KEI is essentially based on the number of searches that are done for a term and the number of pages that are indexed for that search term. The higher your KEI, the better the keyword is for your niche. However, there is one major caveat when it comes to KEI. KEI tells you what keywords are easier for you to get ranked for based on the # of competitors and and # of searches. However, that is no how Google rank pages. What if your competitors are Yahoo!, MSN, Wikipedia, Digg, and a bunch of other high quality sites? Is it easy to beat those guys to No. 1 for a search term or is it better to go for a keyword that faces less quality competitors? KEI is a good indicator if you don’t want to go blind in your SEO journey, but by no means is a definite success indicator.