Do the search engines only rank you for the keywords you list in your meta tags or can you come up in keywords not included in your tags. Basically, how important are keyword tags?
It really depends on the indexer. Each do indexing differently and know 2 are the same. Sometimes no keyword tag is better than a bad one. I recently did a study on 6,182,143 pages indexed in 3 search engines (Google, MSN, Overture/AltaVista). Taking a random sample of 10,000 common keywords, then indexing the first 100 results for each keyword listed in the 3 search engines. My study was over 30 pages long, but in short (meta keywords)nearly 35% of the top 100 results in MSN did not have a meta keyword tag. Google only 30% did not have meta keyword tag. Overture/AltaVista over 41% did not have a meta keyword tag. Of those 35% on MSN, 21% had a top 10 position. Of those 30% on Google, 14% had a top 10 position. Of those 41% on Overture/AltaVista, 24% had a top 10 position. So meta keywords may hold some weight, but it seems limited in a figuring the complete index ranking. As side note... Search engines list that they found (5,000,000) results, but if you go past the top 100, this is the result you get... MSN after the top 100, 32% of the links up to the 250th link are dead (not found, domain does not exist, ...) Google after the top 100, 41% of the links up to the 250th link are dead (not found, domain does not exist, ...) Overture/AltaVista after the top 100, 3% of the links up to the 250th link are dead (not found, domain does not exist. ...) It seems Overture/Yahoo does a better job at managing their index, compared to (MSN, Google) da!