Defining Your Targeted Keywords, and Targeted Audience

Many webmasters will try to optimize the websites themselves. This can be very good in a way that the webmasters should know their websites very well. No one knows that better then the webmasters.

However, some webmasters, especially for some newbies, may make a very serious mistake. They may have read thousands of $97 ebooks and learn a lot about SEO. However, sometimes they will just be too greedy. They do not try to optimize for the themes of the websites instead they try to optimize for some more general terms.

For example, if you have a website on WWII, you may probably try to optimize for"World War II History" instead of "History". I bet that most newbies will try to optimize for the latter, which is a) more difficult to get a good ranking and b) not targeted enough.

Taking the above example again, if you are optimizing for "World War II History", your targeted audience will be people who want to get more information on WWII. And they will get what they want when they visit your websites. However, if you optimize for "History", people who want information on Japanese History may also visit your website. Of course you may say that a unique visit is a unique visit and it can still be beneficial even if they are not searching for what you can provide.

This is right and wrong. It is true that a visit is a visit. However, since you put the effort for the general "History" in the above case the exact term "World War II History" may not be well optimize. And in this way you may indeed losing some visits to your website.

And the most imporatant thing is: When you are optimizing for the more exact terms, you are also optimizing for the more general term. And when time goes by, it can also find a place in the search results, for your more general term.