Steve's Current Notes
Week of January 9, 2005

There are many schools of thought on keywords on the internet.  The first discussion is whether any search engine uses them or not. And then more on how many keywords you should have in your meta tags, how many characters, words that stop search engine spiders, how many repeated words, etc.

Needless to say there is more confusion that fact.

My hypothesis is that Google is the search engine that disregards keywords in the meta tags and that some other search sites pay some attention to the meta tags.

As an example here is some keyword popularity research on Mobile Marketing Joblist:. I used the Keyword Popularity Tool at MarketLeap to dig these numbers of of the web.

In the next step of my research, I though I would take a look at my friend Bob Thompson's site and see how it fared.  If his Google numbers were low and the other engines were significantly higher, then I believe I was correct.  Here is the same info on Bob's site, Triad Technology Group:

I am convinced.

And even further research on how Google calculates page ranking has solidified my hypothesis.  It appears Google relies on inbound and outbound links and their ranking in the Google system to determine your placement in its search pages.

In fact, here's a page that goes into much detail explaining what is know of the system (I understand it's a recipe closely guarded by Google) and it includes a easy way to check your Google page ranking. The Mobile Marketing JobList currently has a page ranking of 4.