You do not need to dominate generic and highly competitive keywords to have a successful website. The website simply has to make more money than you put into it or more than what your time is worth if all you put into it is time.

Instead of targeting a generic and highly competitive keyword you should target less competitive and descriptive keywords to get more traffic. For example targetting a highly competitive keyword like ‘web hosting’ for your web hosting business site is not gonna get you on top very soon as there is already an awful lot of competition for that keyword. Sure, the payoff if you were successful could be huge, but your chances of success are awfully slim. Instead targeting more descriptive and specific keywords like ‘business web site hosting’, ‘web hosting php mysql’, unix web hosting, plesk hosting etc might be much more beneficial and productive. The overall traffic on your site will be lower, but you’ll get more traffic as #1 on an less competitive term than #120 on a popular term.

So, what keywords would you want to optimize for?  Well, how about site optimization for questions?

Not everyone conducts ‘question’ searches on search engines, for example some may simply type in a question such as ‘How do I get my website online?’ and expect the search engine to return a favourable response. The people who do this tend are less Internet savvy  and such people are more apt to click on ads, which is a good demographic to attract. So consider optimizing for questions or similar phrases instead of keywords.

The simplest way to do this is in naming your articles or content pages. People will most often link to a page using it’s title, and by titling your articles as questions you’ll surely get that text in it’s title tags, anchor text, and any applicable H header tags.