OH, PS
Oh, and how the hell am I suppose to make a great page packed with "relevant" content in 600 words or less? How much does the length of a page affect your ranking? It seems that many sites with one single link wayyyy at the bottom of the page containing some text relevant to your search will show up before any pages with more than 600 words all about the specific topic. Wish I didn't have to worry how many times I said "gifts" on my gifts site, but it does seem to matter in the ranking so I just want to know what the limit is before the search engine assumes I'm spamming and not just talking a lot about gifts!
For example, I have been told many times that I don't want to have my keyword more than 5 or six times in the whole page. Well, telling someone about a gift basket is hard to do if you can only say gift basket five times and it's already listed twice by the catalog software and once in the title! But, if the customer never sees my description because they bought at Amazon with their one sentence "great gift basket" description that was ranked high, I will just have to go that way and start designing pages I was always taught were "bad".
The writer in me says write good info and share knowledge, the marketer in me says give them what they want, hype it up and sell them what they don't really need after all, and the webmaster in me doesn't know what to say anymore. (he and the writer used to gang up and win over the marketer, but it seems that if we all want to eat next week, we might just have to listen to him a little more!)
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