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Already a lot of good info out there if you search, either use the forum search or go here - http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=seomoz+plural&pws=0&hl=en&num=10 - (the .co.uk results are better than the .com results).

meta-keywords and description don't count towards the content on your website, based on whatever I've read, but the description is extremely valuable in getting people to click.  Alt tags do have some influence, but make sure the alt tag is for the user, and not just for the search engines.  Here's what SeoMoz says about description tags: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/meta-description

Using the examples you offered, I see plenty of branding opportunities: WindowDoctors, CaliforniaWindows, etc. It's up to you but hyphens in a domain name is something to be completely avoided for your main site.

I found Market Samurai to be fairly useful for getting competition data on a few thousands of keywords. However, it is not as in-depth as SEOmoz KW difficulty tool.

I'm following up on old threads in Q&A that are still marked unanswered.. Did this continue to happen, or did it ever settle out? Did you figure out why it happened at all?

The best way I know of to truly research your market and figure out which keywords will convert well is to use Google AdWords.  Aaron Wall wrote a great post a while back about this topic: Market Research Using Google AdWords Aside from that, you can also look at whatever traffic you are currently getting in your analytics.  Although this will obviously not be a complete picture of all of the opportunities available to you, you can certainly mine the data for some sort of actionable information. Oftentimes, the short-tail keywords are not the ones that will work best for promoting your website.  There is frequently a tradeoff between traffic and conversion rate.  Short-tail keywords get tons of traffic, but they don't always convert well.  Conversely, long-tail keywords might not get much traffic, but if you choose specific targets, they can convert exceptionally well.  Obviously your strategy is going to involve targeting a mix of both.

Ok, thanks! I had read that blog post and received good information from it, but I was hoping to hear some newer tactics that were floating around since the post was written in 2007.

Yep, I agree with you there - never have trusted using &pws=0 logged in or out

I use google analytics- Is there something special I should set up to track this?  Or is it something to do with filtering? Or any ideas on where to learn to set it up to track conversions and traffic for this 1 group of terms would be a great help. Thank you for your comments EGOL Handcrafter

Awesome, super helpful...thanks!

Hey Alex, Sorry that you're having that issue with Keyword Difficulty! These new in-site results do seem to have thrown off our tools, so we need to consider how to address them. Obviously, in-site links take up a lot of real estate in the SERPs, so the fact that they're there does add a lot of competition. However, I'm not sure if we've decided yet how we're going to treat them in the KWD tool, so stay tuned for that. Also, if you could send an email to help@seomoz.org with your PRO email address, the KWD search you're doing, and the example SERP, we'll take a look for you ASAP. Thanks Alex!

Thanks a lot Barry for useful links.

According to Google's Adwords Keyword Tool, "austin plumbers" gets more search volume (go for Match Type 'Exact' in the left-hand column). Neither offer much volume though, so the results might not be that accurate. In your title tag (and everywhere), I think you should use whatever makes most sense for the user, with SEO secondary. Your text should look and read naturally otherwise it'll come across as spammy. It's good to use variations of your keywords, and not always right next to each other, e.g. "plumbers from Austin". Take a look at this for example: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization - it's an old-ish post, you might not want to include as many repetitions of the keywords - natural text is the key.

Like Daniel suggests I wouldn't use this as a long term strategy, to me it would send a pretty strong signal that the site is spammy. On the other hand, if you are comfortable with it, you could always give it a test and see what CTR difference you get.

I believe new domain names usually take 2 months (average) to "age". Beyond that, your ability to rank will rely on standard seo ranking factors.

They have a "learning machine algorithm" so the servers do a best guess. When searching for apples it just looks at what most users where searching for and displays that result.

Agreed. Paste in the keywords, concatenate it, go to your favorite search engine, and you're ready to rock. You could get fancy and probably have the results pull directly into Excel, but if that is possible, it's over my head.

If you're doing on-page SEO, you can't focus on broad match, you can only optimize for the exact keyword phrases you use on your site in H1 tags, titles, and all the rest. You could try to find all the broad match synonyms and stuff them into your title and H1 etc etc but then you're diluting the SEO value for any given page by doing so. Best to focus on 1 or 2 keywords per page and optimize for that. My suggestion is to take the large volume you get from broad matching, and find the exact phrasing that takes the lion share of that volume and go with that. As Dan mentions you must be careful though... within a set of related keywords that broadly match a phrase, some keywords are at the beginning of the buyers funnel and others are at the end. Make sure your site is optimized to take people along that funnel. Don't only optimize for the biggest search phrases that only people not actually buying use.