Keyword Research

When doing your keyword research, Obviously you go for the words with the least amount of competition. but when your compiling your list do you also add the high searched words with massive competition along with the lower comp. words? or should you just concentrate on the lower comp. words?

I was never any good at keyword research, But I'm giving it a go once again.

Well, this is just me, but I concentrate only one keyword phrase per site. I don't know if its a good thing or 'right' thing to do, but at least that way I make sure I rank and compete for a keyword phrase I want.

It is a complex strategy...Ideally you should be using web 2.0 and article marketing to handle the long tail keywords. Blog commenting and other high pr link building should be done with your main keywords.
Focussing on only one keyword phrase per site is just like leaving money in the drain... Why would you rank for just ONE key phrase when you could be doing 10 of em.

Yeah getting into keyword research requires time and will to do it but also most important is experience so you can compare what is too competitive for you. For example what is too competitive for someone for another will maybe be easy, it all depends how good you are in SEO and link building. I usually separate keywords in 3 groups. Of course longtail the easiest, mid tail something that will take some effort and most competitive keyword which is usually the "root" keywords of my site. You can get most links for homepage because it's your domain and all directories and similar things you submit only top level domain, not deep links. For categories (silos) I use mid-tail and for articles/pages I use longtail mostly. So yes, if you have a good SEO process and you know how to do Link Building than you can aim for high search volume keywords but if you are new into this it's better to stick with a lot of longtail keywords. You have to understand that search engines rank pages not sites. So target 1 keyword with 1 page. That will get you the best results because this page will be optimized for that 1 keyword.

I think I understand now, thanks for the replies, I appreciate it.