Now…I don’t know anything about how to optimize product listings, however I do see a huge need for it for my company.  For most of our targeted keywords, before any search results appear, there is a list of about 2-3 product listings.  We definitely want our products to show up in those positions.

I have a few ideas of where to begin.  I possibly will use more keyword phrases in the product titles, a lot more alt text, and perhaps customer reviews.  I am not quite sure, and will be spending the next couple of days researching and testing.  If anyone has any good ideas, please let me know.

According to Google’s Webmaster Blog

Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.

Google employee and general SEO spokesman Matt Cutts released the following video:

According to Matt Cutts, Google (and most other search engines) did use META Keywords several years ago as a factor in search engine rankings.  However, SEO Spammers realized this and would spam the META keywords with unrelated keywords or even competitors keywords in order to manipulate their rankings.  This has been done away with.  Those of us out there looking to rank for specific keywords will have to use legitimate methods.

Does this mean that the META keyword tag is completely worthless?  No.  I actually happen to use it a little.  Many ranking report programs will automatically pull META keywords from the website and use those to check for rankings.  I will add my keywords for just this purpose, even though they have nothing to do with rankings themselves.

Image pulled from http://www.dynamixwebdesign.com