Ask to speak with the receptionist or the person who takes most of the incoming calls for the business.  This person hears the language used by people who ask for their services.  These people often know more about the keywords to target than management.

I did a one-semester internship while in college.  They paid me $2/hour - which was more than the minimum wage at the time and tells you a little about my age.   It was a great experience because I attended public meetings and wrote summaries about them for a member of the governor's cabinet.  I also examined public utility tariffs and wrote summaries about them for the same person.  My supervisor critiqued my writing severely and that made me a much better writer in a very short time.  Great experience.

I lived several hundred miles from home for this work and the expenses of living in the city in low-rent housing consumed my paychecks.  Full-time internships at my university were for 16 academic credits and I also had to pay full tuition and fees to receive them.  I made a few extra bucks from plasmapheresis looks at arms.

In a previous career I worked for a government agency and we had interns every summer and they were paid slightly more than the minimum wage.  Our office was in a University city.  Although the students didn't have to establish living quarters far away what we paid them barely covered their living expenses and they had to pay tuition to the university for the internship. We knew that the interns would be there in the summer and had projects for them.  Many of them did field work that could only be done in summer weather.

In another career I was a professor and saw students complete internships at many government agencies, companies and organizations.  The university required a written job description from the employer that needed faculty approval.  That helped  employers plan the experience and demonstrate that it would meet university expectations and the award of credit hours to the student (which the student had to pay for). The employer knew that at the end of the experience that the student would prepare a report of what was done and faculty would compare that to the job description.  About 1/2 of the internships were paid.  If you looked at the list of organizations, the ones that paid were usually the good experiences.

(Personal opinion here... If a school does not require an internship then it is usually only the highly motivated students who seek them.  If you are drawing from this pool you are probably getting high caliber.   However, if the school requires an internship then there can be a lot of mediocre students looking for positions and the applicant pool will be different.  If this is your pool, early applicants who have bright eyes and spring in their step are probably your best bet.   Be ready to accept applications early.   'nuff said.)

I currently don't have interns at my office.  I am trying to run a very small ship and trying to be retired.  If I had interns I would pay them the starting rate of a professional employee.   I would be especially interested in 4.0 English majors who have a demonstrated life interest in the content area of my websites.   If you want them to do valuable work that remains after the internship then you want a good written record.  Mine would probably be writing some content and I am really picky.  I would need good people for the experience to fit well with me.  Thus the better rate of pay.

I think I should write to the White House.

Ten years ago lots of people had lots of sites competing for the same keywords.  The shortcut that they usually took was to use the same content on all of those sites.  That approach is dead now... and the approach of using slightly modified text is dead too.

Google doesn't care if you have two websites on the SERPs for the same keywords as long as those two websites are absolutely unique and offers value to visitors.   I have info sites and retail sites in the same SERPs.  No problem  --  at least none yet.

We prefer to make our client's competitors do their own work and break a sweat.

I fill that tag with BS.  That'll fix those lazy weasels.

No, honestly... I still use meta keywords.

When I write an article I write the title tag first....  "Begin with the end in mind."    Then I write the meta keywords.  Makes me think about where I am going.

Anybody who is lazy enough to harvest that info is lazier than smart.  Not a threat.   And, I believe in the theory that imitators come in second.

.....  and....   I bet Google is using meta keywords and counting those nofollow links  it's their "reverse psychology" algo to screw SEOs.  (Of course they are not counting blog and forum spam and sitewides... but nofollow links that appear to be editorially given - such as wikipedia citations - are counted at 5x the normal rate)

I spend about 1/3 of my time improving the content on a long-established site.   Articles are made current, more substantive, new data, updated graphs , additional Images.

I often see an almost immediate improvement in rankings.

These are not just tweaks to a few sentences.  They are major rewrites.  An article of 1000 words and three images might get a new introduction that hits topics in the news and two or three new subheadings and two additional images and an updated data table.

Rankings can go up within a couple of weeks.

I don't think that a pipe or dash or any other character adds or subtracts any SEO value.  Certainly what you type after it is more important.

If your brand is widely known and respected then adding it might help increase your clickthroughs or conversions.

If you don't have a popular brand then "free shipping"... "learn the secrets!"....  or a kickass price in the title tag will pull the visitors in.

... and if you have something that everyone wants such as "free beer" then you might want to included it in CAPS.

Arbitrageurs killed the penny Adwords clicks about ten years ago.  Today, I think that you will be lucky to find any clicks that go for less than ten cents each.

Today you can find a SERP with huge traffic and no ads.  You will think "I can get cheap clicks there".  They do not exist.  Google will run your ads for a few thousand impressions and then force you to bid an amazing price.

We can look at almost any SERP and see people doing things that we don't like, things that we think that Google should be slapping down.  Sometimes what they are doing is directly against Google's terms of service.  Sometimes they are not against terms of service and Google really doesn't care.  Is expired domains against Google's webmaster guidelines?  I don't think that it is.  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?hl=en

You can use them too if you want, but I would not use them because I don't think that they are a good bet.  I think that my skills are better spent on building something right from the beginning and working long term.

Crime?  Not crime?  Either way, inside and outside of Google people get away with things all the time, but if they do enough crime or sneaky stuff or shortcuts, things usually fall apart on them or they get caught.  I can look back at "who was in my SERPs" over 15 years and about every five years there is almost a complete changeover - but the people working to make a great site remain and get stronger.  Crime and sneaky stuff gets weeded out.  Some sites that used to be good get weeded out because they take their foot off the gas or start taking shortcuts.

If these things bother you, then you are probably doing your best to run a good site.  So just keep working, doing a high quality  job.  Spend 100% of your energy there and waste no energy thinking about people getting away with stuff, because, in the not very distant future, people doing the sneaking, the crime, the shortcuts will drop to below competitive positions, if they do not disappear completely.   Hang in there!

Where would you rather buy... Amazon where you can't get a phone number, Walmart where the people working know nothing about specialty products, Joe Schmoe who is only trying to sell discount and will not reply to email because he knows nothing about what he sells.   Lots of people buy from us because we have more helpful information on our site than all of our retail competitors and the manufacturers combined.  We know that because we hear it  * Every Day * in our customer reviews.

The ads that we run do not say buy from us.  We never even use the world "buy" or "purchase" or "we sell" on the website.  At the same time that we run our own ads on our website, we are running adsense ads that go to other businesses.  Our ads look like theirs but have our domain in obvious font at the bottom of the ad.  Its obvious who they are buying from. That's on our tiny niche retails site.

The other site where we sell is a large authority info site with a small store.  We have a link to the "store" in our persistent navigation and it gets clicked a lot.  Our product descriptions are 10x as long as our competitors and our informative articles are much more detailed.  We link to informative articles from product pages and to product pages to informative articles.  We can lose customers to information and we can gain customers from information.  It's OK if we lose customers to information because that reduces returned products.   They can also click an ad to our competitors.  But we have no problem making sales and have never heard from anyone anything displeasing that we provide information and sales.