Google made historic news yesterday by declaring they do not use the meta keywords tag. Okay, I am being sarcastic.  Google hasn’t used the meta keywords tag for a long time and any “SEO” should know that.   So why did Google blog about this, on the record?  At least two reasons, (1) people continue to sue over it by claiming copyright infringement and people confuse the meta keywords with the meta description, which Google does recommend to use.

So there are official posts from Matt Cutts, the Google Blog and Search Engine Land trying to erase any confusion from people who are new to this space.

If you want to know which meta tags Google does pay attention to, see this FAQ. Plus, Google’s JohnMu tweeted that Google also does “not adhere to the “revisit-after” meta tag,” if you wanted to know.

Finally, here is a video if you don’t want to read any of this:

SEOmoz has recently released their updated SEO best practices guide.  Unlike some previous releases, they used actual data to back up their recommendations.  Some of the previous best practices guides had little testing data and have now been changed.  The new guide covers the following SEO topics:

• Title Tag Format
• The Usefulness of H1 Tags
• The Usefulness of Nofollow
• The Usefulness of the Canonical Tag
• The Use of Alt text with Images
• The Use of the Meta Keywords tag
• The Use of Parameter Driven URLs
• The Usefulness of Footer Links
• The Use of Javascript and Flash on Websites
• The Use of 301 Redirects
• Blocking pages from Search Engines
• Google Search Wiki’s Affect on Rankings
• The Affect of Negative Links from “Bad Link Neighborhoods”
• The Importance of Traffic on Rankings

Stone is an SEOmoz Pro Member and we use their SEO toolsets alot.  Rand Fishkin (”the wizard of moz”) and his gang have built strong street cred in the SEO world with the release of their guides and other information.

From You Can’t Touch This to a profound love for web analytics, MC Hammer has had quite a journey in life. But I have to admit his excitement about web analytics is well founded. Without numbers you won’t know how people are finding your site, where they’re going once they get there and about a thousand other juicy nuggets of information that, at the end of the day, can provide a lot of insight into your website’s operation and strategy.

Be sure to watch the video and if you’re feeling like maybe you haven’t been as excited about your site’s analytics as Hammer is about his, then its time to start.