Yahoo! has urged marketers to choose appropriate keywords for their paid search campaigns.

A post in the engine’s search marketing blog reiterates the message we tell clients day after day – choose business specific keywords.

It suggests firms bid on both generic and specific phrases, warning generic selections can quickly eat up budgets and are less likely to result in sales than more targeted choices.

This is such an important point for search engine marketing and for natural search tactics.

Yahoo!’s example is the broad word “guitar”. Now, a consumer plugging that word into a search engine could be looking for lessons, wanting to buy a guitar or seeking sheet music.

Businesses choosing to bid on that word had better have a pretty broad range of guitar-related services, or they risk wasting their marketing pennies.

So, in terms of paid search, it makes sense to target keywords which are highly specific.

However, often it is tempting to pursue generic and highly-competitive keywords through the organic results.

If a company decides its wants to aim for high rankings in the most-competitive phrases, it is important to make use of some less generic phrases at the same time.

This allows them to rank highly for business-specific keywords while they battle to climb the rankings of those more difficult phrases.