How to pick the right keywords for backlink building in a Huge site

[martincad]

Hi there,

I'm running a coupons/discounts web site, with more than 1 millon page indexed. The website niche is crearly related to Coupons, Discounts, Deals, but those discounts may apply to hundreds of different categories. Currently we are getting 15K organic visits a day.

Every time we have to write blog articles to increase backlinking, the same question came up. Should we target our niche keyowrds (which are very competitive) or should we pick long tail keyword (3-4 words) to be more specific ?

The 70-80% of the organic traffic we receive every day came from long tail keywords, for which we never did any offert to rank with. This 70-80% traffic lands into internal pages.

So basically the question is: should I keep backlinking the home page to get more juice on my domain, which will organically flows to the long tail landing pages ? Or should I write hundreds of articles targetting directly the long tail ?

I think that targetting the long tail will cost me a lot of effort, i.e. for a particular long tail google search (with 4 or more keywords) I get 10 visitis a day, ranking in postion 3. If I made a lot of effort to rank in the first position for that long tail keyword, I may only get 50 visits a day, so for duplicating my daily visit amount I should do that work for thousandths of keywords, which seems, to not have much sense.

So, should we target the domain and lets the rank flows from there, or should we point to thousandths of internal long tail landing pages ?

I hope I made my self clear enough.

Thanks in advance

[TheeDigital]

The number one goal is you want to come off as natural in your link building efforts after Panda, so I would suggest a mix between the two.  This will come off as "natural link building" which google likes to see.

[JasonJackson]

Disclaimer: This is a thin, quick response.

Ranking for money terms is obviously... money.  That said though, google is penalizing sites that are only targeting money terms.

Go for a balance between keywords that will have a nice ROI and those that your visitors will just enjoy(some articles even having no direct monetary gain).  If I was in your position, this is what I'd do.

edit: Just to be clearer, I would want to avoid building a site that doesn't cater to its audience.