Questions about optimizing keywords on a website for Google

After browsing through many Google forums, I decided to stay with you, as it seems here are the most competent users around.

So, I am quite new to SEO and I have a few major questions about optimizing my site and I hope to find some answers here.

1. Does a .biz domain has the same ranking chances with Google as compared to a .com domain, or will Google give it a lower ranking, if one is assuming that the optimization is the same on both sites?

2. If I search the terms 'Samui' and 'Villas', why are there 'a lot' of other pages in front of me, who have domains that have completely different terms in them. I understand, that many of them have been longer online, but shouldn't Google not give search results who have the most relevant words starting from the domain over the description to the keywords?

3. This is an extension from question no. 2. How important is online time, I mean how long a website exists, to Google? For example, If I have two identical websites and one of them is three years older, will Google prefer the older one, or doesn't Google care, as both contents are equal?

4. Does Google see word combinations of keywords. For example, if my keywords consist of:

widget1 widget2 widget3, widget4 widget5 widget6, widget7 widget8, etc.

does it combine these keywords if someone searches for 'widget1 widget5 widget6', as all these word exist in the keywords, but not in the same order?

5. Does Google check singular and plural, or does it makes sense to extend the keywords with all different possibilities, like "widget1, widget2, widget3", "widget2 widget1, widget3", "widget3, widget2, widget1", etc.

6. My Pagerank is 3 and a lot of my competition has PR's of 0, 1 and 2. Why are they still listed higher?

7. I got my website in the first 3 month to PR 3, when can I expect it to rise to PR4 What can I do to help with this?

8.I have around 400 inbound links in Yahoo, but Google only shows 21. Why doesn't Google count the other ones. And what a pain to get these inbound links it is.

So, that's for the beginning. I assume I will have a lot of fun in this forum

Peter

I have .info domains that do just as well as any other site that works as much as I do on mine. I don't see why .biz would be any different.



Google is going to favor the one with a higher cumulative authority linking to it. Unless that is equal too, then the age will probably be the kicker.



I used to believe Google would find "word" in "words" and that you could keep everything plural and still get counted for the singular version.

Googles keyword significance addition to Webmaster Tools doesn't seem to support that though. In fact, it was showing a high significance for "words" and a much much lower significance for "word", yet when looking at Google Trends I can see that people are searching for the singular version more often than the plural one. (a generic term was used in the linked example, it will look like that for just about any pair of singular/plural terms though)

I was pretty much shooting myself in the foot by going after the plural version.



Because the cumulative score of all things Google considers when ranking a page is lower for you than it is for them.



You can probably expect a drop back to PR1 before you get to 4. I've seen that same pattern happen quite a few times. No idea what the rhyme or reason behind it is.



Without looking at your sites links to be sure, a common reason for this is Google makes it possible for a site to say "We can't vouch for the content this link points to" and most sites utilize this ability on things like comments and forum posts.