Importance of keyword in the content to rank well

[levalencia1]

Well, I am very beginner seo.

our website is www.theprinterdepo.com and our main keyword for the moment is refurbished printers, but there might be hundreds of more keywords.

I was analyzing the SERPs and found that for our keyword, the first 2 websites that come up have very different content

1.http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=PRN

They rank first, but I dont see a lot of text with the keyword in their text or links

2. http://www.valstarprinters.com/

They mention the keywords lots of times in the text, probably they are doing keyword stuffing?

So this makes me thing, how the 1st one ranked there? just by link builiding?

[Highland]

I tend to find ranking goes more or less like this (this is oversimplified for the sake of argument)

1. Relevance (i.e. site content)
2. Site importance (i.e. links)
3. Other factors (trust, penalties, alignment of the planets, etc)

So you have to look at the big picture first. Geeks.com is a large and popular site (it's even a Google trusted site!) and it's relevant to the search (because they do sell refurbished printers). I would bet they have lots and lots of backlinks in general.

The second site has keyword overkill, that's for sure. It's not unfair to call that keyword stuffing. But they also have you pretty beat on links. Using the comparison feature of Open Site Explorer, Valstar has twice as many links as you do. Worse, half your links are nofollow (pass no rank). Valstar has a Mozrank of 53 and your site has a 40.

[ResslerMotors]

Just to give you a little perspective:

You have 103 Root Domains pointing at you.  Geeks has 4300.

Now, they aren't doing their on page perfectly, but I'm going to guess that they haven't really needed to.  They are trying to rank for a few different search phrases on the page you've provided, so in a sense they are diluting their strength.  However, they are strong enough, at this point, where it doesn't matter.

As you will always hear, though, I'd suggest working on your on-page ranking factors, and trying to acquire high quality links.  I ran a quick check on your site, and you are internally pointing at 301's (such as http://www.theprinterdepo.com/plotters-drawing.html).  This will cause you to leak a little link value.  I found about a dozen in a couple minutes.

[levalencia1]

I know what a 301 its, but I dont understand how you found that?

Just a little background information

we had a website called www.theprinterdepot.net and we wanted to move to .com

when we moved we put a 301 redirect in the www.theprinterdepot.net to the .com

I did that in the php.ini, its that the 301 you are talking about? should I remove it and replace the welcome page with a we have moved to or something?