[thelist] "spamminess" site check - realtymort.com

[Stephen Rider]

Hi evolters --

I work for a company that has had a website for a number of years.  
We've never had _great_ ranking on Google, but we've always been there.

The boss-man is absolutely driven to raise the rankings in search 
engines (I explained to him that Google's entire business model depends 
on web coders not being able to directly manipulate the rankings, but 
he doesn't want to hear it...), so he keeps insisting that I keep 
tweaking word order in Title tags and such, in a vain attempt to find 
the perfect "keyword" optimization.

In an attempt to help this issue (and several other such as browser 
compatibility), I rewrote the site about six months ago using pure 
XHTML and CSS, which among other things majorly increase the 
content-to-noise ratio of the pages, improved structure, etc....

We've hovered around 80th place when searching for the phrase "chicago 
apartments" (it's primarily a building management company).  Google 
redesigned their algorithm in November, and suddenly the page is 
nowhere to be found!  It pops up if I search very specifically (as in 
the specific company name) so we're still in the database, but we don't 
show up anywhere under various types of keyword searches.

Here is the site:
<http://www.realtymort.com/>

I thought the site was well done in terms of readabiloity to search 
engines and such, and I'm not doing anything blatantly "spammy", AFAIK. 
  Am I missing something?  Is there something I'm doing horribly wrong 
here?

Notes:
1) The Site Map is brand-spanking new (as in, "yesterday"), so that's 
not part of the issue.  I added that in attempt to alleviate the 
problem.  Bad move or good move?

2) There are two domains pointing to the same site, so that may be part 
of the problem (but wasn't before).  <http://www.aptrentals.com/> goes 
to the same site.

3) The words "Chicago Apartments" was recently added to the beginning 
of all page titles... not sure if this is the problem or not, just an 
FYI.  Doesn't seem to be too terrible of a crime, but slightly "spammy"

Please take a look.  All advice is appreciated.

More generally, do you all know of a good source of "search engine 
optimization" advice?

Regards, (and tips forthcoming)
Steve Rider