I think I understand that if you use key words frequently on a page crawlers are more likely to find and pick up your site.

How much of a difference does it make what you call your site? Is the overall name less important--or not important at all? Is it trumped by the words on the page in every case?

I just want to make sure that I'm right about the specific page ruling when it comes to seo--rather than the site name.

thanks for any info you can give me, or any resource you can point to.

Search engine crawlers are more likely to find and pick up your site if other sites are linking to it. Then frequency of crawling is typically related to how often your site changes and how much of an authority the engines consider it to be in your specific industry.

Here are a few sources worth checking out:

1) Search Engine News (I'm a big fan of theirs) -- excellent monthly newsletter and Search Marketing Book. Costs $97 for 6 month subscription which includes the E-Book as well as access to their archives (lot's of great articles in the archives). You can purchase a subscription at www.searchenginehelp.com (note: this is NOT an affiliate link -- it's just the URL of their sign up page -- their regular site is password protected)

2) SEOBook -- Aaron Wall has a nice blog with a lot of quality information. He also has an E-book called (take a guess...) SEOBook. I have read parts of the book and it seems very solid. The URL of his site is www.seobook.com. You can purchase his book at: http://www.seobook.com/buy-now.shtml (again, this is NOT an affiliate link).

3) Dan Thies has a free E-Book on SEO, but I'm not sure when is the last time he updated it. I haven't read the whole thing, but from the comments that he has made on his forum as well as some things that I have read on his website he certainly seems to know what he is doing and I imagine that that comes through on his website. You can download his E-Book here: http://www.seoresearchlab.com/

4) I am putting together a list of search marketing tutorials (I'm in the beginning stages). I'm almost finished with the keyword optimization tutorials. The great advantage of my tutorials is that they are free and (I hope) up-to-date. The great disadvantage is that they are not finished. You can reach these tutorials at: http://www.sembasics.com/sem-blog/search-engine-optimization-tutorials
[NOTE to moderator -- if this is out of bounds please feel free to remove this section of my comment].

My best guess is that keywords in the search term when found in the URL - site name or page name - count as equally as if found in the title meta tag. Next, the number of times found on the page. Formatting such as header and bold and large font tags may help a bit too. Also, when the keywords are used in the text of links to the page (in and off site).

Hope this helps.

ps : if you decide to chage your page names, expect a couple of months big dip in ranking as the engines get confused between old and new pages (silly it takes that long, but it does). On the other hand, After 2 months you might be glad you did. But it might improve things only 10% or so.

pps : think of the search terms people are likely to use to search for your site and make sure they appear in your text and title - verbatim. Search engines don't always act smart in determing hominyms and plurals.