What to rank for in google?

Well, there are lots of ways to skin that cat. I've had success writing articles for places like EZA that are built around longtail keywords in my niche. In some cases (most cases if you do careful research), those EZA articles will rank at Google pretty quickly. Then, you want your sales page built around a keyword that is broader and gets more searches. In your EZA articles, use the author box at the end to place links to your sales page using the main keyword phrase as the anchor text (that's the part of the link that's clickable). For example, if you build your sales page around the keyword "fishing tackle" then you'll want the links pointing to it from EZA articles to also say "fishing tackle" so the search engines give you some love. Vary it a bit. Don't always use that exact phrase, just most of the time. Some of the time, use "fishing poles" or "fishing lures", etc.

So, that's one way.

Another viable way to go about it is to use all longtail keywords. Instead of working for months to get a high ranking for one competitive keyword, you can try to achieve the same traffic effect by blitzing with a lot of longtails. So what I'd do there is pick the best longtail your research uncovers. In my book, the best would be whichever gets the most searches with the least competition, but that's not the only way to evaluate it. You might find a longtail that gets fewer searches, but seems like one that would bring a higher quality visitor (ie, one that is looking to buy vs. one just looking for information).

Anyway, pick the best longtail you can and optimize your sales page for that phrase. Then it will take fewer (sometimes far fewer) articles at EZA to get your sales page enough link juice to rank nicely at Google.

Hope that helps!
John

Don't try and achieve too much too soon i.e concentrate on aiming for something achievable by way of a fairly longtail phrase and work your way upward.