Best SEO Keyword Strategy

The hands down biggest mistake most bloggers and webmasters make is to go after root keywords that they have no chance of ranking for. If you are doing this, stop right now and consider the following....

• Most root keywords like "credit cards" "credit card repair", "marketing", "hosting", ect. have companies with deep wallets that can throw up thousands...sometimes tens of thousands of dollars...into building backlinks for their sites. They do this because some of the root keywords can bring in thousands of dollars a day.
• Most bloggers and webmasters won't have the time or patience that it takes to rank for these keywords anyway. Ranking for most of the root keywords can take upwards of a year or more to even be able to sniff the top 10. This means that for the average blogger, they will have to work at it extra hard and quite possibly without any reward for a very, very long time.
• Root Keywords and those who rank for them typically make money from the volumes of traffic. While this may seem enticing, note that the amount of traffic is usually equivalent to the amount of money and time you put into it.

From a blogger's perspective, since you most likely won't rank for a root keyword anytime soon, the better approach is to target long tail keywords that have a high potential of ranking. While the traffic is not the volume they are hoping for, in most cases long tail keywords are further down in the research funnel.

When people look to buy something, they tend to start general and get more detailed in their search queries the further down the rabbit hole they get....with each step comes a better potential of buying.

It all boils down to keyword research and digging deeply into your market or niche for the conversations that people have (keywords that they type in when they are looking for stuff) that have a decent amount of volume but aren't as competitive.

As a niche marketer, I can personally attest to the power of this and could see how putting together pages and pages of long tail keywords into a blog over time could potentially give you more traffic than simply vying for the root keyword.

I know this because I have thousands of website properties (hubpages, infobarrels, ezine articles and the various article directories as well as self hosted blogs and free hosted websites in my network.  Some of these pages may not get any traffic at all for days.  Others will get 30-40 unique visitors a day.

Added all up, the more pages you have that are targeting ultra specific conversations, the more traffic you will get.  It doesn't sound like a fun endeavor (content creation), but it is a simple fact if you plan on building traffic and sell stuff online.

In her book, one week marketing plan, PotPieGirl illustrates niche marketing concepts perfectly.  She shows how volumes of content can result in $100+ a day sales if you understand how to target the right keywords.

Target those long tail keywords rather than focus on root keywords.  Grab those "easy pickings", the low hanging fruit first.  And then as you build hundreds of pages across your network, you will find that ranking for more competitive terms becomes easier.  That is the best SEO strategy not only for bloggers but for webmasters in general.