As some of you know, I've had an 'issue' with the literally hundreds (maybe thousands?!) of 'new experts' that have come along in the past year in the web marketing space.
I've written numerous posts in other places, such as my "Ten things you should ask your new SEO company".
In a post to the Google Webmaster Central blog on Monday, one fact was made 'perfectly clear'.
Google does not use the Meta Keyword tag as part of it's scoring process for ranking purposes.
The post was followed by a video by Google's Matt Cutts (which I've embedded below). You may want to read the dialog in the comments on Cutts' personal blog and / or the Google Webmaster Central Blog for more questions and answers.
Google has been more and more transparent in recent years regarding their process for getting 'rank'. I would urge those that think they should be ranking, that aren't, to, at the very least, subscribe to the Google Webmaster Central RSS feed.
Whether some chose to believe it or not, the fact is that SEO is essentially free advertising. Google currently is over 60 per cent of that market.
The Cutts video is below.