Long tail keyword phrases

Build a site with a bucket load of great content that covers topics large and small in your niche. Rather than go keyword by keyword, just produce content. Then start working on your internal link structure so you can capitalize on the pages that seem to need an increase in rankings.

Yep, that's the way to go. You can mix your anchor text up to get some off-site relevance to the page to cover the shorter phrases too.

I would suggest adding LSI keywords in the anchor text instead of pieces of the long tail keyword. Google doesnt care about the pieces. Its relevance he is after.

You only need the one keyword phrase. The other ones will still be able to rank because the keywords are already in the original phrase. This is for on page optimization. You can use the one long phrase for the heading, the title, and in the content. However, for off page SEO, you are going to need to mix up the backlink phrases.

keywords:
the largest selection of award winning tattoo designs, largest selection of award winning tattoo designs, award winning tattoo designs, winning tattoo designs, tattoo designs

You would want to use them as anchor text if you were trying to get high rankings for them.

In my opinion, it doesn't matter what you to do to that site as far as SEO goes. You should be more focused on creating content and trying to gain popularity in other ways. It's hard to get traffic to sites, however people think it's a piece of cake. You're going to have to work hard promoting.

Google is not going to get you a lot of traffic. You will need to focus on submitting to blog directories, making blog comments in niche, forum comments in niche, and branding your site offline to bring traffic. Most people just focus on Google to get traffic, but Google has so many different algorithm filters for new sites. They make it hard for new sites to get traffic and rank well. Therefore, you need to find other traffic sources.

In the past, it was easier to get traffic. I think now it's more important to brand your site so that people know about it. The easiest way to do this is television, radio, and high traffic site advertising within newsletters, blogs, or articles. However, it does cost a lot of money. This is why people a lot of people fail online and never make it.

I think you should try getting connections with people that are succeeding in the tattoo business and try to get them to promote your site. You may have to pay them, but this will be targeted traffic that can help your site out. Try getting an advertisement in tattoo magazines or guest blogging for a popular tattoo site.