Question

please describe why it may not be a good idea to go after keywords that are more general and have a higher search volume?

Answer 1

What you are trying to achieve is that your website or product, etc., shows up as near to top as possible when people search. You can do this if the keywords that are applicable to your site are really unique, in which case when someone searches with those keywords they land on your site and nowhere else. But you see the problem is that it will be just a handful of people who would be using such unique keywords (and maybe they will be the employees of your company).

In order to get more people to search for your site you want to use keywords that are more common. But the problem is that the more common a keyword is the greater is the number of sites it refers to, so the chances of someone searching a general keyword landing on your site are also very small.