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I'm no SEO guru, but when I started out I found keyword difficulty tools quite useful. I think if you're a newish/low-authority site, it's pointless and a waste of resources trying immediately to compete for, say "real estate" because bigger, better sites are way ahead of you. I got around the problem by targeting long-tail keywords "eg, real estate in Chatanooga". Less competition, easier to rank for and, because it's a more focused keyword than merely "real estate", greater clickthrough and ROI.

Yes. You should/could use the canonical tag to specify your preferred version of pages with identical content. This can be the homepage or any other pages within your site. Mike

Yes, I figured it out now. (duh). thanks! It is curious that Google web tools didn't pick those up.

Cool. No worries StackOverFlow has always been awesome in helping me with my IIS rules and such. If you Google: site:stackoverflow.com apache redirect You will see MANY examples of how to set up 301 redirects, including redirecting from non-www to www pages, etc. Hope this helps. Mike