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I'm sorry I'm not making you feel helpful. You have been helpful.

Ok, got that and I agree that customer feedback and knowledgeable sales people are great reviewers of keywords and they are one of the primary sources we are using.

We have thousands of skus however and thus a we have a business need that the process be automated to whatever extent is possible.

We can ignore the Google Keyword tool results entirely - that's an option and perhaps a rationale one. But the Keyword tool is based on Google's own indices and therefore I think is a great source of keywords that have not appeared on our lists by other means. It also shows total searches and competition for those keywords so you can get a sense of what your competition is doing and how many pages already have those keywords pointed at them.

All that said, he question remains whether the most common or least common are more important to emphasize for SEO purposes.

EGOL,

I have a very specific question regarding keywords generated by the Google Keyword tool - whether most common or least common would be better for SEO.

Your royal "we" makes you sound silly, but I'm figuring you hang around here because you know something about SEO.

If you google me, you'll see that I've actually built and sold companies before. I know something about SEO but I'm not arrogant enough to make assumptions.

My question was pretty specific. If you have an answer or comment on the question, I'd love to hear it.

I'm not sure why folks seem to think I am completely new to this. We already captured all the incoming keywords and are implementing content and url nomenclature strategies around those.

Was just wondering if we should be using most common or least common google-generated keywords to boost SEO.

The rationale of using long-tail keywords with higher likely CTR vs. common keywords with lower CTR is compelling and I was trying to phrase to question to get feedback.

So far: question: 1, answers: 0

Well, let's take the question more generally then and ask:

which keywords should be emphasized in the content and the meta information:  most common or least common?

Uh....ok

We are converting an old static html ecommerce site to a new platform. The old site has excellent ranking for some of the products.

In order to maintain our ranking we will implement 301 redirects from old to new pages (as the urls will change to SEF).

I am using Googles Keyword tool (in adwords) and entering each page url of the old site (there are hundreds, I'm doing the top 50 in traffic) and generating a set of keywords, then sorting each list by global searches.

For each page, Google's Keyword Tool is giving me hundreds of keywords, but in meta tags there should be no more than 15, so I need a method to choose the keywords on the new page.

Question:  in the new meta tags should we emphasize the most common keywords (as defined by most global searches) or the least common keywords?

I would hate to lose the good ranking for the least common (long tail) keywords.