Should i go after a keyword that google says High Comp

That alone is not a sufficient indicator. It is the QUALITY of the competition, not the quantity, that is important.

ahhh thanks bud you always seem to answer my questions your a star

I've worked my way up from:

completely uncompetitive keywords to
mildly competitive keywords to
competitive keywords to
incredibly competitive keywords that make me want to rip my hair out when I try and rank for them

I think it's important to start simple. If you just into a competitive keyword and you don't have the knowledge to overcome the competition you will end up quitting I guarantee.

I'm guessing that you're using Google's keyword tool? That "competition" indicator is the competition for adwords, google's advertising service. While it may be a general indicator of the popularity or competitiveness of a keyword, it is not necessarily indicative of the competition for "organic" search ranking.

A reasonable indicator is to use the Google search engine to find the first 10 listings for your keyword. Then you have to do a little creative investigating to find out what sets those 10 apart (and especially the first 2 listings b/c that's where MOST of the traffic goes).

Key things to look for:

1. Age of the domain. It matters.
2. # of backlinks.
3. "Authority." Think CNN or wikipedia versus your site; they have more authority or "pull" than your site.

Some lesser keys:

4. Look for dot gov and dot edu links. They seem to have greater leverage on the SERPs. Sometimes 1 or 2 of these backlinks are worth dozens or hundreds of dot com type backlinks.
5. On page SEO: Think "meta" like keywords/phrases in title, domain, and description. It seems simple and Google supposedly doesn't look at meta tags anymore, but you may be surprised at how quickly you can rank for less popular keywords just by doing your on page SEO right.

Obviously, there's not a whole lot you can do about #1 (wait, then wait some more) and #3 is difficult (vicious cycle - traffic begets higher search rankings and higher search rankings beget more traffic, neither of which you have right now).

#2 is pretty easy (just look at all the backlink programs all over the IM forums), so that may be what you want to tackle first. TONS of ways to do this:

1. Comment on blogs
2. Submit articles to article directories
3. Social media (twitter, facebook, countless others)
4. Blogs and other social networks pointing to your site/page
5. Guest blogging (kind of does #3, where you "borrow" somebody else's authority by arranging to write for them an awesome post)
6. Forum posting (like here)
7. Many, many more.

Hope this helps.

Wow thanks everyone, il be sure to try out traffic tracks and thanks for the advice guys! And that sponsorship just sounds INSANE!

Thanks again

Charlie

I've Hubbed about high, medium and low competition keywords on HubPages. With 6 months of data in Analytics I can honestly say that I'm earning about the same from keywords with each type of competition level. A Hub with 60 visits a day for a low value keyword seems to earn the same as one about a high value keyword and just 2-3 visits a day .

There isn't any downside to "swinging for the fences" on some keywords as far as I know. If you build enough content and vary your keyword targets, you might benefit from what's known as a long-tail effect where the volume of keywords you're targeting brings you a significant amount of free traffic over time.

I cant thank you enough Steven!

Steven, you are a great example to use all..
Congrats relicah !

Question:
I tried to download traffic travis but it doesn't work on mac.. any other suggestions please?

Wow Steven... Very nice of you to do that.