Well, maybe not dead, but if this guy is correct (and I have reason to believe he is pretty darn close) one of SEO's holiest of grails (meta keywords) seems to be pretty much a waste of effort. Anyone disagree? I'd surely like to know how to position my efforts wisely.
Meta stuff
The search engines pay virtually zero (0) attention to meta stuff anymore mainly due to abuse over the years. The only thing they might MIGHT use would be a meta description to use as the snippet in a search result, but in my experience even well crafted meta descriptions only get picked up 40 to 50% of the time. The rest of the time the search engines will make their own decision. And meta tags are not even considered at all. They completely ignore them (again due to abuse). The search engines will look at your content and pull what they consider to be the important keywords out of your content.
On my client's site's even though I have the ability to add keywords I don't even bother as the search engines don't use them. I do meta descriptions, but given they only use them about 40-50% of the time I don't spend a lot of time on them.
Catagorize and tag your posts (total of 12 maximum tags + categories), use keywords in your titles and in your content but do not overuse them and everything will be fine. WordPress.COM has some of the best SEO right out of the bag of anywhere around and a wordpress.COM blog with the exact same content will always be higher in search results than a self-hosted blog with all the SEO tricks.
Worry about creating high quality content, post regularly, use keywords in the content and titles and forget about all the rest.
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