Quit Trying To Rank For Keywords With 1000's of Exact Searches Month

Let me start to say that you still need to pick those kw's with 1000's of exact searches/month as they are your base keywords, the kw's that are in the first place responsible for the juicy long tail traffic.

For example the main keyword for one of my sites has 8100 exact searches/month, however when I add something simple like "2013" at the end of the keyword it still has 1300 exact searches/month according to Google Webmasters, which showed 1300 impressions over a month time for that specific keyword.

I rank for that one at #1 and get about 400 visitors from that position.

I rank for the main one at #8 and that one gets about 200 visitors per month.

Get my point?

I never used the 2013 variant keyword a single time as anchor in my link building campaigns btw.

Lately the humming bird update bite my site a little bit in the ass, causing the main keywords to drop to page 2, my traffic dropped from 400 uv's/day to about 250 uv's day.

My income only dropped with 25%

See what I'm saying?

Those main ones often don't even convert that very well so why harm your link building plan by over-using these keywords? The benefit is so small while the risk is so large (especially when you run EMD domains).

If you know what you're doing (98% on this forum is not and even I keep on learning everyday, the hummingbird is the proof of that once again, although not so hard to tackle with some adjustments) then sure go after those main keywords. No reason to leave money on the table.

Just realize that the keywords with the most searches are often not the best converting ones so quit staring yourself blind at it and throw those kw research tools over board. Just focus on the main keywords and build long tails around them using brand names as well as prefixes,suffixes like best/buy/cheap/discount/review/top 10/top rated and so on.

Also avoid spammy back links.

A dozen or so solid links and well structured thought out sites go's a long way, then rinse and repeat and before you know it you make a very decent income from your affiliate ventures.

ps: I wrote it before, do not monetize every single page, only place affiliate links at max 40% of your pages and link the non monetized ones back to the monetized ones. You get a lot more trust from Google when doing it in such way and might even get away with other things that aren't perfect (crappy content for example).