Everybody is frantically spending inordinate amounts of time and effort in order to capture and hold on to their most prized keywords and phrases. Everywhere you look, you'll see companies promising to lift your website to the top page for any keyword (clearly a bit of false advertising for all but a maximum of ten of their clients). People are spending good money to get to the front page... but why?

I mean what's all the fuss about winning certain keywords? Sure, it's important to have good visibility on the search engines - a large portion of most any website's traffic comes from searches. But why, in particular, does everyone fight tooth and nail for a select few keywords and phrases?

The standard answer is that they are the most popular keywords and phrases. Well this sounds convincing but it is ultimately meaningless because it is not an absolute measure of traffic in the sense that it doesn't tell you what share of the overall market for a given topic that keyword has. A given phrase might be as little as 2% of the overall traffic for that subject (probably less), but everyone's wasting uberbucks going for that 2%. So, I ask again... why?

The answer is simply because:

I'm not saying you should disregard SEO entirely. Actually, quite the contrary! SEO is hugely important and it's unlikely you will succeed without paying it a bit of attention. I'm suggesting that it is far more efficient to concentrate on an overall good SEO policy that will attract a wide range of people from all areas of your given niche. Why waste 80% of your resources going after 2% of the pie?

In fact, the actual figure is this:

Think about how silly it is to ramp up competition over the top few keywords in a niche to the exclusion of over 70% of the overall traffic. Take the time to generate quality content using good SEO practices and the traffic will come - maybe not from one keyword, but from a range of keywords.