Tweaking Wordpress

For those of you building your small business websites (or even e-commerce sites) on Wordpress, Lifehacker has published detailed instructions on "tricking out" your Wordpress site. If you're interested in finding the top Wordpress plugins (it can be daunting to sort through all the available ones) or changing design themes, this article is a good starting point. Check it out at Lifehacker.com.

Forget about the keywords meta tag

I've mentioned in class before that the keywords meta tag is basically useless for search engine optimization and ranking. The description meta tag is important if you want to control the page description in the SERP (search engine results page), but the keyword tag has no value because Google bases keyword analysis on human-readable content.

Today, Google confirmed (apparently in response to a variety of legal actions regarding keyword tags) that they completely ignore the keywords meta tag. Bluntly: "Google doesn't use the 'keywords' meta tag in our web search ranking."

I don't think you can get a more clear-cut answer than that. For more information and an explanatory video, click here to read the complete article at the Google Webmaster Central Blog.