One of the biggest problems most webmasters and small business owners encounter when they first step into the world of search engine optimization is they often target some of the biggest and most competitive keywords. Inevitably what happens is they go at it full force until they give up and throw up their hands in disgust and write off search engine optimization as some kind of voodoo magic…

Now regardless of the tactics they sued to optimize their website the big problem remains that they targeted keywords that were too competitive to begin with. That’s a big no-no in SEO particularly if you’re just getting started. What a lot of SEO companies may or may not tell you is that targeting a really competitive keyword may take you months if not years before you see and tangible results. When you target really competitive keywords or phrases you have to be in it for the long haul. If you’re a real estate agent or a mortgage lender, the fastest way to let an SEO company or consultant know that you don’t have a clue what you’re doing is to ask them to rank you for a term like “real estate” or even worse “mortgage.”

Not only are those some of the most competitive keyword phrases that exist but what you have to do is realize who your competition. When it comes to mortgages, your competition includes CitiMortgage, CountryWide (now Bank of America), LendingTree and Wells Fargo. I don’t know about you but I’m pretty sure they have a much larger budget than me.

With that in mind you need to be cognizant of who your competition will be when choosing your keywords. By no means do I dissuade anyone from targeting competitive keywords but in my opinion the best approach is to target both competitive terms ad long tail terms at the same time. For those that don’t have an idea what long tail keywords, long tail keywords are basically long strings of keywords (usually three or more keywords) combined to make a phrase. So if you’re a mortgage lender in Miami you may want to begin your SEO campaign by targeting the phrase “Miami Mortgage Lender” instead of going right after the big keyword – “mortgage” since it’ll be months until you even come close to ranking for something that competitive.

In essence what you want to do by targeting long tail keywords is choose keywords that won’t have as much competition and will be easier to rank for. The tradeoff is that they won’t deliver as much traffic but most of the time long tail search traffic is more targeted anyway. But by targeting long tail keywords you’ll have a much better chance of getting a steady flow of traffic to your website right off the bat. Whereas if you solely target single or two-word keyword(s), it may be months before you see any traffic if ever at all.

For more search engine optimization tips check out the Los Angeles SEO.