Dominate low traffic keywords first?

I keep seeing people say "good traffic, low competition, great keyword" or stuff like that. But I also see that it's good to dominate smaller terms (not your main one) to build up momentum heading into your main keyword.

But would the second concept work if I just had a whole truckload of low traffic, low competition keywords that I was set to dominate? Would it carry the same effect as finding medium/high traffic, low competition keywords?

You should also try with the long tail keywords. I have found with some of my sites I get a much better traffic through long tail to start off with before then moving onto the main keywords

not a pro here (hoping to get there), but to go with what nick-harper has written, I think it would be good if your "short tail" main keywords are included in your long tail keywords. So, you would be sort of optimizing for both.

If one of your main short tailed keywords was "blue widget", maybe get links pointing to your site with anchors such as "large plastic blue widget information" (if that would be a decent longtail keyword for this situation) or whatever.

I was wondering about this as well.

Say I want to eventually rank well for "blue widget" which is a highly competitive term in this example. Obviously going broke for the straight away would be tricky.

I can see the logic in following Viltedali's advice to go for phrases like "large plastic blue widget information" - my question is should I target mainly the long tail and then switch to the main term a bit later, or should I be building up a few links for just "blue widget" while I'm getting the long tail ones in place?

You should aim for all (or most of them) the keywords your niche can get. But start with the easier ones. Then when you site starts receiving traffic, you can scale up with the bigger ones.

Your main page should be optimized for medium to big keywords. But the others with the rest. Cross-linking between pages is also good, especially if you do article marketing.

Use both low and higher competition keywords. The low competition keywords give your site quick traffic. While building backlinks the higher competiton ones start slowly making there way to the top. You also could be lucky. Some of those high competition keywords may be much easier than one would expect.

long tailed keywords def to start out. Only keywords with 200-300+ a month though

The other thing to remember in all of this is the quality of traffic. Most of us are trying to get a customer to convert, etc... A single highly targeted page for a very targeted (low volume) KW can convert at 10%, vs. a general KW converting at 1% or less. For instance if I am selling softball bats, the KW softball bats gets 10,000+ searches per month, the search easton fast pitch softball bats gets 190. The person just browsing types in softball bats, the one who is getting serious about buying types in easton software bats, the one who is ready to buy today, easton synergy srv2m (a model of softball bat). It takes a lot more work to score well for lots of targeted pages, but they do make money