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Thanks very much Paul.. Very helpful!

Thank you polarking, I'll keep that in mind as I progress. Appreciate it!

EGOL, thank you! I'll try re-working a couple of the popular blog posts. Appreciated!

Patrick, Great answer! I think the fact that certain numbers in the "Avg. monthly searches" field appear repeatedly can be a bit confusing. Now that I know this field means Exact Match, I guess it follows that the numbers in that field are rounded coarsely, or in such a way that tends to produce similar numbers. For instance, the two keywords in the set which each have 5400 searches. Anyways, thanks for the great answer. It is very helpful and encouraging to know that the result I am chasing after may yet offer good potential. Warmest regards, Greg

Well first thing is to ask yourself these questions Who is my target audience? (Marketing 101 but it's amazing how many people skip this) What am I relevant to? (How relevant is your site content within industry or niche?) What problems am I trying to solve? (Every search query generated is someone looking for a solution to a problem) Does my site require localization? (if the site has any relevance to location that will play a big part in your Optimization strategy) What are my goals and KPI's? (Knowing what the "R" is in "ROI" for you site and or campaign is essential to planning for it's success.) Who are my Organic competitors? What are they targeting? (Knowing the competitive landscape in and out will give you a clear indication of routes currently explored my others in your space and will help you determine you KW path) Who are my Paid competitors? What are they targeting? (Don't forget to research the paid media targets & spend of your competitors. PPC will give you great insights into high converting terms and will provide you with a great snapshot of you competitors mindsets when placed side by side their organic plans.) And last but not least, Who do I want to rank for and where? (Here is the question that every optimization guru needs to ask themselves when trying to "rank". Searches are tailored now to an individual and results can and will be scewed by a searchers location,social interactions,search history and more. So understanding the who, what, why and where is essential to your long term sustainability and ultimate success) Finally let say that while keywords are still a relevant piece of planning your campaign and should get some focused attention, they are losing relevance by the minute as Google has gone almost completely to not provided now anyway. Also you don't want to get into the habit of having your reporting be Keyword focused. Start researching new and exciting metrics that can show real return. SEO's trying to hold onto reporting heavily on Keywords will be out a job soon. So focus should be put into planning a relevant, valuable, content rich website that takes it's intended audience on a specific journey resulting in whatever your "R" is. Focus on your audience and being hyper relevant with solid best practices and you will be fine.

One tool I've begun to use more frequently is Search Queries in Webmaster Tools.  It doesn't tell me what keywords I'm not using already that others are, but it does give me insight into how people are already finding their way to our sites.  I look at the percent changes which show me trends in what people are searching for and use that information to add new content and more in depth information.

So, for example, if I'm PRO, do I get 300 keywords TOTAL, or 300 keywords for each campaign?

Yea I would limit this to a lower number to few important comparisons not all highest, lowest, and few middle priced, and maybe most know stores. Adding content will help to mitigate this as well. But if its under 5 I dont think that should be a red flag

I've found Wordtracker to be the easiest to get started with. You can enter in keyword phrases on their home page and get instant, actionable advice. Then, after you've made a few choices in Wordtracker, go to AdWords to compare and refine your results. However, here is a down-and-dirty way to find out high-traffic keywords: Go to Google.com and log out of your Google account. Start typing in your search terms Google automatically returns the most-searched terms while you're typing.

I am a huge fan of Long Tail Pro. You can enter in a few seed keywords and it automatically grabs thousands of related keywords from the Google Keyword Planner (so you don't have to mess with it). Then you can sort and filter by search volume, organic title competition, CPC, etc. But perhaps the most valuable part of it is that is uses Moz's API to determine Keyword Difficulty so you can quickly determine which keywords get a decent number of searches and are not that competitive, aka the Holy Grail of SEO. (I am not affiliated with LTP, just a big advocate of it since it's definitely the best keyword tool I've used in years and it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention in the "mainstream SEO" community. Maybe because the site looks kinda spammy and sales-y but I promise it is legit!)

EJD, Maybe you've read it already but if not, be sure to absorb the info available here: How To Do Keyword Research - The Beginners Guide to SEO - Moz In answer to your question,  generally, the more words in your target key phrase, the fewer other websites you'll be competing with in the search results, as most marketers tend to focus on the top tier words. By definition though, the further out you are on the "tail", the fewer searches there are being performed for that phrase.  Less  competitors means it's easier to rank highly but less searches means there's less traffic for you, even if you are on the top of the results. You'll find that your list of keywords will vary in their competitiveness and as there aren't any good/easy keyword tools out there for doing long tail keyword research for terms with very small amounts of traffic, some amount of your traffic is going to be acquired by experimentation.  As a learning experience, I'd recommend that you go ahead and optimize a page for the "online dyslexia test for children" phrase and build your pages and your knowledge from there.  While you're in between optimization tasks on that first page, take time to become very familiar with the rest of the optimization guide, as all of that info will be helpful in coming to terms with your keyword research.

Hello David, There are several great answers here, and I'd like to add one more option. The inbound marketing companies on the Moz Recommended List have all be vetted by Moz.com and should be reputable. If I were going to hire an agency one of the least of my concerns would be which tools they used. Do your research to find out what kind of reputation they have in the industry and trust that they know what they're doing. Good luck!

Hi Scott, It is my understanding that search volume within the Keyword Planner Tool is given by exact match only.  However, in the planner tool, the performance projections are given for each different match type. Hope this helps, Chris Wilson

No problem Ruchi and thanks for the info. Its time to educate the clients Broad match search volume numbers can be very, very misleading and the client should know about what broad match is all about and how it cannot help them, of course we need to first ask them what is that they want to do with those numbers. Good luck. Best, Devanur Rafi

Hi Justin - the new keyword planner still allows you to do keyword research, entering lists and producing suggestions etc. The one thing that has changed is that you have to sign into your Google account now, but you don't have to be spending on Adwords to use the tool! adwords.google.com/keywordplanner Laura Philips over at Koozai has done a nice post on the Keyword Planner and how it has changed from the old keyword tool we all knew and loved. She also looks at alternatives, I would recommend taking a look: http://www.koozai.com/blog/pay-per-click-ppc/the-new-google-adwords-tool-alternative-keyword-tools-2/

Ubersuggest to generate a bunch of keywords. Twitter/Quora/Yahoo Answers/Forums to see what questions people are asking for possible topics. Get their keyword volumes (filter out the real low search quantities) via Keyword Planner Group/combine common keyphrases Determine which topics to write about based on 1) competition 2) search quantity 3) topic intent/relevance (would this topic attract visitors that would help my site fulfill its goal?) 4) timing (seasonality, availability, trends) Just keep in mind that every website/business is different and could use information from different sources. I recommend trying out all of the tools and seeing what they have to offer. From there, you can streamline your own process that is most effective for your situation.

Well the specific keyword that I am targeting has a difficulty score of 48 and the other pages are not updated frequently, To me honest I doubt that they are updated more then a few times a year. I know this is a minor issue and I was just curios to hear, what other people had noticed about the update frequency of certain niche keywords. But what I get from your post is that, some keywords are updated withing a few hours and some withing a month. Is there any rare cases in you opinion that might take even longer then that?

Thank you very much for the elaborate answers, this helps a lot

No you are not. EMD penalties are for the ones that abuse that. ie: have several EMD pointing to the same site; have the entire site flooded with the keyword, etc.

There isn't a fixed, known answer to your question, but perhaps I can offer some guidelines. First off, repeating your keyword over and over on the page is very unlikely to fool Google any more, and boost your ranking.  On a page with 1000 words, it might be natural to see the primary term the page is about repeated a dozen or so times; if it appears 100+ times, Google is very unlikely to decide that makes the page MORE relevant for that term, and more likely, Google will see that as an indicator of spam.  My advice: write naturally, and don't try to inject the keywords...just make sure they appear once or twice. In page titles, the answer is in the SERPs themselves.  Do a search for a reasonably competitive term, e.g. "Nikon D5200".  None of the page 1 results have the term in the page title more than once.