The idea of using inanchor/intitle is simply to help us weed through large keyword lists. For instance, imagine if you have built a keyword list of several thousand keywords. Ideally you should analyze each and every keyword by looking at the top 5 – 10 results in the major search engine and seeing how well they are optimized for the keyword in question. That, however, is not usually realistic, so it is helpful to have some sort of means whereby you can decide which keywords to analyze first, which ones second and which ones to leave off for a later time. I find that intitle/inanchor is currently the best means of doing that in that it gives you a sense of how many sites you are competing against. From there I infer the level of real competition. Of course, given that there are MANY more factors which determine the search engine rankings this method is not perfect and it is not at all unreasonable to find that at times it will be easier to rank well for a keyword with 50,000 “competitors” than it is for one with 1,000 “competitors”. In other words, inanchor/intitle search is a helpful tool in certain situations, but it is not sufficient in and of itself as a means of fully analyze the competitiveness of a keyword.

For more information, see my tutorial How To Analyze Your Keyword List.

Hope that helps.

All the best,

Moshe
SEMBasics.com