Raj, I don't think there's any need to delete them, if that's your concern. P2A won't let you insert enough keywords to be considered spammy even if the SEs did read them.

Chris... mmmm....let's see, NOT eat to be successful at dieting?

Suzanne

John, writing as someone who practically lives inside Point2Agent sites, let me just say that it's a very fine system, but it's not perfect. In my opinion, providing the ability to edit  keyword meta tags is dangerously misleading.  I really wish they would remove it altogether because it may make  ill-formed members think that they doing their due diligence on keyword optimization when, in fact, they are doing nothing at all.

John, in my opinion the harm comes from members mistakenly believing the keyword meta tags are useful and thus not using keywords in places that are useful, not in leaving them in.

And in my opinion, Point2Agent does NOT do such a great job taking the site owner through the paces of SEO. For example, the online user manual, which is only a few months old and should contain current information, simply says, "Do not forget to fill out the meta keywords, description and title as provided to you by Point2 NLS. Search Engines use your website address, site title, description and keywords to rank your website, so make them all parallel and focusing on one important relevant phrase. An example is provided below." It would be far more accurate either to tell users that the keyword meta tags are no longer useful or simply to remove the keyword meta tag function from Edit Pages altogether.

Actually, Google officials HAVE spoken of the relative unimportance of keyword meta tags: The Director of Research at Google, Monika Henziger, was quoted (in 2002) as saying, "Currently we don't trust metadata." One of Google's web pages describes the keyword meta tag: "... these days is mostly useless" (http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html).

There are also a handful of nationally prominent SEO experts, in particular, Danny Sullivan, long-time publisher of SearchEngineWatch.com, who hobnob with people in the search engine industry and seem to be reliable resources of information. Sullivan wrote of the death of keyword meta tags in October, 2002:

http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061 

The only exception that I know of is from various experiments with placing made-up nonsense words in keyword meta tags. If a made-up word appears in a meta tag and Google's database doesn't see it anywhere else on the Web, then it map appear as a search result.

The consensus is not so clear on Yahoo's use of keyword meta tags. Its SEO guidelines say to use them even though most of the experts say they are of minimal, if any, importance. My own site gets visitors via Yahoo even though I didn't include keyword meta tags, so I can't believe they are of much importance.

John, I agree with you that anyone CAN do it! SEO is not rocket science. The only problem is that because it's an ever-changing field, you really have to stay on your toes to keep up with it. And as soon as you think you know what you're doing, Google will change its algo... whatevers (I can never remember how to spell that word!) What's more, there are always new strategies developing, such as blogging, social networking, contextual linking.

The problem with the idea of P2A trying to offer a checklist is that they already do -- and it's already out of date. Like I said, they aren't perfect (don't get me started on how their recent vendor page redesign killed my best source of leads. Or on why the heck they used frames when no professional web developer in his or her right mind has used frames for years. I can't tell you how many times I'm annoyed because a client has asked me a question and I can't simply send them a URL for the answer in the online manual because the d$%m thing is framed. Point2Agent does some stuff really, really well, but they drop the ball in many areas. Nonetheless, I still feel that the system is one of the best out there.

So, I think that to do SEO really well, you almost have to do it nearly full time, otherwise it's nearly impossible to keep up with new developments. I specifically do NOT offer SEO services, partly because it's just not the best use of my talents, but also because I am very aware that there's always something lurking out there on the SEO horizon that I don't know enough about, so I don't feel I can offer  SEO consultation of a high enough quality to suit my perfectionistic tendencies.