Are keywords dead?

I wouldn't say they are dead. I like what Scott said. "They're not feeling well". Content is key when engineered properly for search engine optimization. Keeping in mind your title and descriptions in both the code and content do play a major role in your search engine optimization. Izzy Macaluso

Keywords are not dead, but content is far more crucial in this ever-changing world of the search engine game. If you are delivering good content to your target market, no search algorithm can afford to ignore you!! Sanjay Mehta

Meta tags are not 100% dead, but have very little weighting- for now. I suspect this was in response to keyword stuffing/abuse & the fact that they are not visible to the user and therefore not part of the user experience. IMHO SEO is about 3 things- in order:

1. Content- drives SERP & volume- still king.
2. Linking- drives popularity, although more challenging now with global "no-follows" on many social sites (i.e. flickr)
3. Site Architecture- drives accessibility. Building a well formatted, 'bot friendly' site Marco Bailetti

Make Google Happy

There are thousands of search engines out there, but only one commands 68% of the search market –

So, yes you should aim to make Google happy. And Google is willing to help. If you care about your ranking on Google, then start at the beginning – Google’s webmaster tools. Start with diagnostic – what Google sees on your site that should be fixed. Start with Content analysis - See potential problems with site metadata, such as title and meta description information.

There is an old adage about Cobbler’s children having no shoes – so big surprise - we’ve be a little remiss in keeping up with Google’s web tools. So by way of bad example – here are our Content analysis: www.dohertyassoc.com

While we were crawling your site, we noticed some issues with the content of your pages. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users

We need to clean up the meta descriptions on two pages, and interestingly the duplicate title tags are a result of a blog created by blogger (a Google ap) and using tags in the keyword descriptor.

Start at the beginning and check out what Google sees when it looks at your site.

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