If you have an astore or amazon associates site,are you totally responsible (is keywood research just as important & the same as for a non amazon site)for where your site is ranked in the google searches/listings,or seing as amazon is a big player will it rank higher than a non amazon site with the same keywords? cheers for any help.
An Amazon astore is not indexable by search engines. Unless you have some content around it. Or, use some script like: http://www.adbabel.net/astore-seo/
I think an astore is treated the same as any other website or blog, you have to promote it via backlinks if you want it to climb in the SERPs. You can do some optimization during the astore setup via adding keywords under different pages, etc. Also, you can link to products in your astore to build "deep" links to it.