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Today was really my first day testing the keyword tool. I'm torn between it and Wordtracker... is there often problems with the SEOmoz keyword tool?

Hey Steve, As Ryan mentioned the keyword meta tag is no longer used for ranking purposes. Here's a great Google Webmaster Post and video with Mat Cutts that covers this topic. As for your keywords I would stick to 2 or 3 per page so that the page is targeted and tightly themed. If you try to optimize your pages for too many keywords the content will likely start to become diluted and less valuable from a search engines perspective. To answer your second question more directly it would be ideal to have individual pages that target a single keyword, however I would only recommend this if you have quality content to support each of the keywords. Otherwise, your pages will have a difficult time ranking. Something to note is that a few of your keywords are multi-purpose. In other words, if you optimize one of your pages for "digital aerials stockport" you will naturally be optimizing for "aerials stockport" as this keyword is contained within "digital aerials stockport." Just something to think about If you're looking for some tips on keyword research check out this section of the SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO. Hopefully this helps - good luck!

We have several clients that need this type reach.  Using an "in your Area" navigation link, and then as stated bt EGOL  and bookworm,  doing a community page for each city works pretty well.  So one page listing the communities, and a page linked to that page with each cities information. The only other point I would make is you will need to add some serious link's and citations to the site, and the individual pages will need some attention as well.  Reviews from customers noting the city are very helpful as well.

I would definitely use Wordpress for a blog.   And I agree with EGOL, keep the content in a folder.

Also available is SEOmoz' http://www.seomoz.org/popular-searches

There you see, that's my concern... I do not want that... ok thanks, makes sense to tune my pages just a bit to include at least one mention to each keyword and make sure I grow my ranks... Thanks a lot both you for the ideas and experience.

Yep you sure can.  (Won't be a HUGE issue if you link the two together since there are only two sites) That's actually what the search engines frown upon.  Depending on your main focus (Which one you want to rank higher) you can use canonical tags. You can use the canonical tag to point the lesser important one to the more important page.  This will let the search engines know that the content has a parent site.

is there a better alternative... Just opinion here... I would not use any of the three alternatives. Honestly... If I really wanted Name1Name2.com I would pay whatever they want to get it. Get on the phone and track them down.  Hire a broker to track them.  Go to domainer forum at last resort and offer $xxxxx... your best offer for the domain.  Accept no substitue. If you can't afford that then go with a brandable domain like twitter, google, digg, etc

I tend to agree that you can't take everything Google says at face value, at the end of the day they're still a company and have their own interests to defend. You indeed could develop several other KW-specific domains (assuming you had the domain names), but I think the big reason not to is that it would take a lot of time and money to get peripheral sites to the point where they compete with 12 year old domains with thousands of quality links. IMO this time is better spent on your own site on something other than SEO - like marketing, which has its own SEO benefits.

It's certainly on a case-by-case basis as I've seen. Certain terms (ex. photographers) is searched much more as a plural than as singular. The real answer to this question is do your keyword research, and see which terms is more sought after.

Raven Tools also has a feature that allows you to watch the rankings of keywords. You can also tag events in the results to see what effects certain efforts have on rankings... pretty nice.

Have you tried the SEOmoz On-Page Keyword Optimization Tool? You can test your page for all of these terms and get optimization suggestions. I would probably start with that and experiment.

I would encourage you to look at Google Webmaster Tool data and observe clickthrough rate averages around different keywords and derive phrase potential by predicting traffic scenarios if position for that phrase increased by n positions and how much it would yield in terms of conversions.

You're welcome Alan.  Getting past the basics and understanding the nuances can make all the difference over the long term.

I'm currently reading a book called "In the Plex" by Steven Levy which talks about how Google got started.  They talk about how Google learned to predict relevance.  I'll paraphrase the example because I don't have the book in front of me. Let's say someone typed in the search phrase - i want to buy a cat, and they get their page of search results.  But let's say that they immediately go back and do another search.  (This tells Google that their results didn't provide an answer).  So this time they type in, i want to buy a kitten.  Now, Google knows that cat and kitten are relevant to each other.  Similarly, if their next search was i want to buy a devon rex then Google knows that cat, kitten, and devon rex are all similar terms.  Of course, the algorithm wouldn't change for just one user's search but rather if hundreds of people were interchanging cat for kitten then eventually the algo learns that they are relevant to each other. So, how can you use this for seo purposes?  Check out this search for i want to buy a cat -cat The "-cat" tells Google not to include searches that use the word cat.  So, you get results that Google thinks are relevant to I want to buy a cat.  From this search I can see that I should also be targetting the words, kitten, persian, siamese, main coon, etc. This is a quick off-the-top-of my head example, but you could certainly play with it.

I want to check a specific word, Google translate doesn't seem to do much apart from guess no matter what you put in. Anyone got any ideas?

When changing the title meta tag to: KW | Company Name I have a little extra room, should I add the City and State to the end of the meta tag?