I rewrote the footer copy of my home page.....it came out to 599 words....is this too many? Also should I link keywords within this text to depper pages on my site?
599 words isn't too many words for homepage content. If this footer is repeated on every page of your website, then I would say yes it is too many words to duplicate. You definitely should link to internal pages from your homepage. A website's homepage typically has the highest PR. So you should take advantage of that and carefully link to the pages that you want PR passed to. In-content links are thought to be more beneficial than regular navigation links. Google may place more weight on such links as they are surrounded by relevant text instead of dozens of other links. Try to limit the number of links on each page though. Search engine spiders can only crawl and index so many links per page. Previously people limited this to a maximum of 50 or 100 links. These days I believe the Google spider can follow up to 200 links per page, but I would still try to limit it to 100. If you have too many links, only so much PR can be passed to each page.
599 words for your footer? Am I mistaken your words? That is a lot. Any way, footer code is less important than the previous code. If you view source a page, the top code will be considered more.