Is Targetting the Least Competitive Keywords Safe?

In my humble opinion for the average guy trying to obtain natural search traffic online, targeting main and competitive keywords is a fruitless task not even worthy of pursuit. From analyzing past websites I have owned and even a few currents ones I find no matter what you put up, people will find your content eventually through obscure phrases no-one could ever dream of targeting.

I’m beginning to think not targeting keywords might actually be the best approach - to forget them entirely and throw out keyword research tools such as Wordtracker and Wordze. One things for certain and that is if you’re targeting big top tier keywords or even the least competitive keywords in your titles etc then Google will know right off the bat you’re attempting to manipulate their engine, which they may reward you with a long time-penalty or whatever else it is they do.

I guess what I’m trying to address here is whether or not it’s good practice to target small keywords because I’m building a few new sites and I’m still in the mind-frame of researching and building sites around words and phrases that people are actively searching for in the hope of gaining more natural free traffic.

I’m concerned this is an out-dated strategy and as website owners we can suffer for it but trying to determine this is difficult. I have read about a -950 penalty for over-optimization which some say using exact keywords in titles can trigger and Matt Cutts himself mentioned this subject in a video here which makes me wonder.. or worry.

I guess I’ll soon know, if one of my new sites ever gets re-included (I purchased a domain that was banned, put up good unique content and submitted a re-inclusion request on March 18th which I’m still waiting on).

Uhh - I’m beginning to wonder if I should have left this all behind and if returning back to it is a bad idea!

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