Hi - can anyone advise me on how Google responds to keywords located on different pages of a site. By this, I mean if i design a website with a minimalistic home page - say a large picture, menus and only a few words - how will this compare with a site that has a heavy word count on the front page. Which one will Google favour (if any) in search results.

More clearly - if I have a website selling dog biscuits and in example 1, my site has the word 'dog biscuits' once on the front page and 99 times on other pages in the site - how will this 'rank' for the search 'dog biscuit' compared to a site that is absolutely identical but for the fact that it is designed with the words 'dog biscuits' 20 times on the front page and 80 times on other pages

Hope all that makes sense

Neither, you need to remember that SEs rank pages not sites.

just make sure that you have a good navigation menu on the "home" page otherwise you are likely to be setting your site up for having problems getting crawled.

Add a meta keyword tag and a description tag with keyword in your pages, and also show the keyword in your title, that's it. And then put your focus to content on how to serve your customers.

Focus on your link building, it have a big part On success...

Most search engines love content and original content is the best. And to reiterate what Chris said, search engines rank PAGES not SITES. So you need to look at each page on your site and decide which ones you want to rank well for and work on those to ensure that they have good original content (at least 300 words) and also a mix of your keywords used naturally within that content.

andymac, there's more to where a page will rank than the number of times a word appears on a page. There are pages that rank #1 for keywords that never appear on the page.

You should try to use your main keyword in your page title and a variation of your page title as your main page heading. When you write content for your page think of the people who will read that page and use the right amount of keywords for them. Just make sure the page reads naturally.

It will probably be easier to rank a page that has a certain amount of text on it and not just images. But that's really not an absolute since there are so many factors that come into play about where a page will rank.

Chris is right in that it's the page that ranks and in both of your examples each of the home pages would be competing not only with the home page of the other site, but also with the interior pages with all the extra keywords.

I hope I've helped answer your question a little. I can't give you an absolute since there really are a lot more factors than the amount of times words appear on the page. My best advice is to write the page for the people who will read it. Whether a keyword appears once or 99 times on a page that page can still rank #1 for the keyword.