One of the questions I get asked a lot these days is whether to go after a single high traffic keyword or to target a bunch of what are known as long tail keywords. There are numerous advantages to each. Obviously by targeting a single keyword, you can allocate 100% of your link spend budget at that particular word. You can also highly optimise your page content for that specific keyword. The danger however of going after single search terms is that primarily, you risk what is known as an over optimisation penalty and secondly, with high traffic keywords comes high competition and if your website is relatively new, you may be waiting several months, perhaps even years before you’re ranking in your desired position for your term.

In contrast, long tail keywords offer a lot less in terms of raw traffic figures, but they are a lot easier to obtain than their single, high traffic keyword counterparts. The advantage of targeting long tail keywords is you can target thousands of different phrases with a single website and will often rank for these long tail phrases based on the optimisation of your page and content alone instead of the links you’ve purchased.