A common mistake that website owners make when trying to drive traffic to their sites, is to try to compete for the most popular keywords within their niche.
Let the novices fight over these keywords. They will have virtually zero chance of getting on to page 1 of the major search engines because every man and his dog is trying to use the most popular and competitive search terms.
Just because the Overture/Yahoo keyword selection tool, or Wordtracker says there are no searches for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, that does NOT mean that nobody is using that keyword phrase to look for your product or service.
The above mentioned tools are a first port of call for hundreds of thousands of website owners. However, that means that the keywords that are thrown up are used by thousands of people as well, making them extremely competitive.
Those tools are also skewed in favour of USA results, simply because there are more people in the USA using the tools than anywhere else.
Let me give you an example…
One of the websites that I own is to do with moving to Cyprus to live.
If you type ‘Moving to Cyprus’ into the...