If a home page has more content, would it help in the search results? how much?

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Freelance Programmer
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Compared to what?

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Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

I also have a question along the same lines...how many times should one use a keyword on the index page and on the internal pages. I know that if you do not use it enough the bots won't pick it up and if you use it too much you run the risk of being black listed. Is there an optimal number to shoot for?

There's a lot more to it than just how many times it's used on a page. Here is a page out of SEO Guy's Tutorial.

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Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale

My thoughts:

Keywords.
For Google not necessary.
For Yahoo and MSN - stick the search term at the start of the first and second paragraph.

Home page.
Google should be your home page for unknown first time visitors, who can arrive via any page other than your home page.
Home page is for those who already know your URL, and can be as small as possible for fast loading.
Have found 7 more today that are over 200k.
20k could be considered to too much.

I see, so the index page should act more as a doorway page to the site's main information rather than be crammed with paragraphs and links.

That is my thought.
If poss max 5k., if not 10 etc
Absolute max 20k
And bear in mind that anything over 101k does not exist as far as G is concerned, and that includes links.
Have you checked that pages on which others have placed your link ?

I have not been checking that, I have just been making sure that there are no 302 redirects or other funky business.

It is also my understanding that bots and crawlers do not index the pictures when scanning a site, they look at the alt tag text instead. Is that right?

This is all very interesting. Thanks for the tutorial link and other good information everybody.