I've read a bunch about doing a Google search using "allintitle: keyword" to determine the competition for a keyword. I’ve also read that sites with the keyword in the title will take precedence in the search results over sites without.

I was wondering what the actual value of this is, because I have the keyword in my title (accompanied by a page full of content including that keyword, without overdoing it – I’ve read enough to know how not to spam) and yet my site is not appearing anywhere, let alone above any of the sites without the keyword in the title. And by “not appearing anywhere”, I mean it’s in Google’s index but ranked nowhere.

Is there a benefit to doing the allintitle search to determine effective keywords (ie: targeted words with less competition)?