Am I going about this wrong?

Unlike some of you guys, I only have one website, and it is geared toward fantasy football. Not the soccer version, but the american football version (NFL).

Since going online with the site, my targeted keyword has been "fantasy football". I have reached top 10 rankings on yahoo, and as high as 45 on google. Currently, I am #13 on yahoo, and bouncing around 90 on google since jagger.

I use coop ads, and target heavily after this term, and on a smaller, much smaller basis, a couple other keywords at the moment.

Here is my concern. The term fantasy football on a google search brings back over 30 million results, on yahoo there are over 66 million returns. Now, these results are covered with the major network sites such as ESPN, NFL.COM, etc..., as welll as tons of soccer links.

Overture receives the term "fantasy football" over 71,000 times per day this time of year, and around 35,000-40,000 per day during the offseason.

Would I be better off letting this search term go and simply pursuing other less targeted terms that sites are less optimized for? Or do I continue to fight for the big daddy of football keywords? I need to develop income from my site that will allow me to build it to the level of other fantasy football sites, and I need traffic to do that.

I am thinking of shifting my optimization toward lesser keywords and trying to get #1 rankings with those, at least temporarily. Good idea or bad idea?

I'd go with the lesser important keywords as well as build around your prefered keywords to 3 and 4 word link anchors.

build around your prefered keywords to 3 and 4 word link anchors.
explain what you mean by that? Not sure I am following.

it is a good idea. to get some keywords that not directly from fantasy football but related to it. be sure that they have searches in Search engine. you will definitely get traffic not many as fantasy football keyword but when you put them all together, and in time. your website will be popular. :d

if your keyword seems to be very competitive, I think you should go for a keyword that is much easier to rank but relevant and have enough number of searches. Let say go for a 3 word keyphrase. Good luck('',)

sometimes you need to use a lot of synonyms in your meta tagging.

One (1) keyword? That's all you are targeting?

That was one I was thinking. You are only using "fantasy football"?

You need to skim other fantasy football sites and look at what are the common meta tag words that appear over and over again on their pages.