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Hi MobileDay! Did these answers help?

You bet Russ. I appreciate what you guys do and am happy to participate and share as I can!

Yes those tools are good and the comment about intent is right on the money too. [Apple might have a high search volume, but that's not necessarily as helpful as you might think, if you are a fruit seller.] One thing I like to do when looking at various keywords is to put them in Moz's keyword tool and see which sites are ranking. This tells you something about intent (the sites that rank highest for a search term are likely to be the most closely aligned with user intent) and about competition (the tools shows you some metrics about the ranking domains). It doesn't help to pick a term with a high search volume if the competition is way out of your league.

Hi, Search Engines caulculate ranking by using many different factors and that is how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes into play.  A few of the well known factors Search Engines use are on-page SEO (Title Tags, Keywords in Content, URL, Anchor Text, Image Alt Text, Image URL, Content above Fold, and minimum ads above fold) and the infamous backlinks from authority sites. There are many more factors Search engines use but what were mentioned above are only a few examples.  Google has 200+ factors they use to determine a site's ranking on the SERP. Here is a SEO guide from Seomoz that might help you understand SEO better and how search engines determine ranking http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo