brittanie – thanks for clarifying… ??
yes, meta tags are pretty much no longer used – especially for the “big 3” Google, Yahoo, and MSN. but meta tags (for anyone who isn’t sure what they are) pretty much only encompass keywords, description, and sometimes that silly “author” tag.
don’t be fooled too much though – search engines still do use your “description” meta tags, at the very least for your index page, and will use it for other pages if it’s being used… but on wordpress, as far as i can tell, there’s no EASY way to insert a separate description tag for each page (considering it typically goes in the header, you’d have to create a separate header for each page of your site… not my idea of fun!)
that’s why i really like wordpress, despite the fact that you can’t set a specific title (other than the title of your page/post)/description/keyword list without using a plugin or doing something drastic, the search engines LOVE wordpress-built sites. (the reason is simple – everything’s linked together, and it’s easy to crawl a wp site – and that’s pretty much it)
you’re right about another thing brittanie – write good content, write a lot of it, keep writing it, and use words that you want your site to be found for.
my first wordpress site had a page about “low point foods” (re: weight watchers’ “points” system) and was my BIGGEST draw to the site, often grabbing me over 200 hits a day. the thing to remember is that had my site REALLY been about skateboards, with that one page on weight loss stuff, eventually the search engines would catch up with me and lower the results for that page, as it doesn’t really have anything to do with skateboards.
anyway – thanks for clarifying what you meant… kinda cuts to the quick when someone makes a general statement that they think SEO is whooey… ?? but you’re correct – meta tags are very quickly (if not already) becoming a thing of the past.
