Dear nearly struggling and nearly quitting small business owner,

This is going to be some straight tough-love.  I care about my fellow small business owners so please know that I only mean for us to succeed.  All of this is to build your success and ours.

Business is constantly evolving. What we did 5 yrs or 7 yrs ago isn’t what they did 15 or 20 years ago. It is no longer what they’re doing now and today’s actions aren’t what they’ll be doing in another 10 years.  

We have to evolve our own businesses constantly and that’s hard in photography or any other small business. So many photographers get it into their head that they’re artists. Look, you’re either in this for art and friendships or you’re in it for business and money. Period. You can make art without having a business. You can make business without art.  But you will fail trying to be a pure artist in a business.

The truth is we all just did what everyone else did and it was enough for a short while and now it’s not so you have to rise above. You have to have a better social network than mom-ographer who charges $50 and is happy. You have to have more advertising skills, more sales skills, more SEO skills. If you treat this like a business you have to give the clients what they want. I’ve heard so many photographers say “I don’t do spot coloring” over the last 10 years. As clients wanted it. Nobody CARES what you want – they care what they want.

Answer this question: what sets you apart from any 10 people in the same industry? If you honestly have nothing other than “I’m me” or “I have a unique eye” you’re not different. How are you setting yourself apart? What’s your USP? I have yet to hear one photographer give a fantastic, life-changing USP. Hell, most photographers are in business but they don’t know what USP means. or SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). Most don’t have a business plan. Remember when 6 or 8 yrs ago some “old dude” said “you don’t even have a business plan! you’ll fail!” and you booked 30 weddings the next year and blew them off? You don’t have a business plan. Maybe you did 5 yrs ago. Maybe you did 3 yrs ago. When did you update it?

Business isn’t about what you want. You can’t blog when it’s convenient. You have to write blog posts when you want clients. You don’t have to blog for ego you have to blog for SEO. You don’t have to blog because you shot a photo session, you have to blog so that others can see your really best work and book you for MORE work. If you don’t blog for SEO, don’t bother being in business. If you don’t blog for future clients, you won’t have them.

The sad truth is many people are quitting a small business right now and they don’t have to quit. But they do need a better plan – a BUSINESS plan. Something I’ve made it a point to do over the last 2+ years is study business, not photography. You need to treat your business like a business. What do clients want? Can you give it to them? How do you reach them? What are your best investments in both time and money from an ROI perspective? How can you cash in on your talent?

I’ve said “I like money” for years to remind me that I need to stay business-focused. TONS of businesses fail. There’s no shame in that. If you hang it up, there’s nothing wrong with giving it your best and failing. We still love all our fellow ‘togs who’ve hung it up and moved on or moved back to the “real world.” The point is, you don’t have to if you’re willing to change. You aren’t selling what you’re offering now – at least not enough and at a level where you’re willing to keep going. Can you change the things that are wrong and do what’s right? Beats me – but if you do, we’re here to help.

This goes for everyone who’s recently quit, talked of quitting or really wants to quit.   

Reinvent yourselves. Be a business. Or quit, hang out with us, and keep making art – because we love you for that too.

Love,

Matt

* A USP is your “unique sales proposition”  or in plain-English, the way you’re completely different than everyone else.  Google’s USP was simple search, no frills.  Burger King’s was “your way, right away.”  Your USP should be unique to your business, not “I’m really hard working.” as most photographers would say the same thing about themselves.    SWOT are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats … they are how you decide when, where and what to attack.  You wouldn’t run into war with a knife if everyone else had a tank, right?  

Very shocking, I know.   Since this is our first list of “seo blogs we read” we figured we may as well start with Mr. Fishkin and company.

One of the best things about SEO are the YouMoz blog posts.  These are user-sourced community blog posts about SEO.  When a blog is particularly successful (lots of likes, great content) it gets “promoted” to the SEOMoz main blog – so these are among the “best of the best” from the users of SEOMoz.  

If you are in the SEO industry and offer search engine optimization to clients, you should be reading SEO Moz.  I’m going to assume you know that and move on.

2) Search Engine Watch

In their own words, SE Watch “ provides tips and information about searching the web, analysis of the search engine industry and help to site owners trying to improve their ability to be found in search engines. ”  They generally write technical SEO articles and care more about “how” and “how well” search engines do their job than the what, who or why of search. 

From the ultra technical updates about the inner workings of Google’s Webmaster Tools to everyday search stats and content marketing “tips,” SE Watch is a go-to resource for the SEO industry and internet marketing in general.  You’ll often find SE Watch content tweeted on our @highonseo account throughout the week.

3) Google Webmasters Blog and Google’s Inside Search blog

Again, a staple in the SEO community, Google’s official webmasters blog is a technical blog about search updates straight from G.  Similarly, the Inside Search blog is a search-related blog relating to the search aspect (consumers as well as webmasters).  These are the only definitive sources, other than Matt Cutts’ videos and blogs, to get direct answers (sometimes) from Google.  If you take a step back and analyze their SEO content, you can also see the “direction” Google plans to go in with search.

Recent updates include an official statement on the Penguin algorithm update, rich snippets (yeah, these aren’t going away) and of course, monthly updates on search.  (52 search changes in April alone!)

Regardless of your thoughts on Google, SEOMoz and other such things, these 3 (ok, four) SEO blogs should be a staple in your feed reader.

Speaking of your feed reader, have you added our feed yet?   We have doubled readership in May!  Thank you for all the tweets, r/ts, comments, emails and SEO business you’ve brought our way!

I know when you started a photography business you never thought you’d think this phrase: “If my html validates, I won’t have WC3 errors and my SEO can also help my CRO.”

Valid code?  WC3?  PHP coding errors? Have your eyes glossed over yet? Let’s get the facts down, then I’ll explain and hopefully make some sense of this  techno-garbage.  That’s what Tech Tuesday is for, right?  

What is code validation and why do we care?  My site looks great!

The code that runs your site is full of words and symbols that have meaning.  Things like <b>word</b> means to bold that word.  We call <b> the “bold tag”  There are tags for underline, italics, bold, strikethrough, and many other font adjustments such as the header above (What is code validation…)  That’s an <h3> tag.  (header, level 3.  Smaller than level 1 and 2, bigger than 4-7)

This code has a specific way it should be written.  By writing valid code, your site should display on all browsers similarly.  This helps when your users are on iPads, iPhones, Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari in the same day.   You think your site looks great everywhere?  Maybe it does.  Check it using Browsershots.  

This is how my wedding photography site appears on some browsers.  Not at all what I had in mind!  (Click to enlarge)

Google cares about validation as well.  Search engines want the best results displayed to searchers on ANY browser.  What if your next possible visitor is using Avant 9.2?  Browsers that are not Firefox, Chrome, IE and Safari make up 3% of all searches on Google.  Google does over 1 BILLION search results a day.  3% may not be a lot of traffic to you but for Google, that’s 30 million searches a day.  I guarantee you Google cares about those 30 million searches. 

So how do I fix invalid code on my site?

I’ll be honest – you may or may not be able to fix it yourself.  I know Technical Tuesday is about bringing the fixes to you so you can DIY but in this case, the easiest way may be to hire someone on elance or Guru.com and have them fix it for you for $20.  

If you want to try to learn this stuff and plow through code yourself, check the link using the WC3 Validator.   This is the result for my wedding site: BestDay on W3C

Let’s try to analyze my errors.  Currently it says (5 errors, 4 warnings)

Error 1)  Line 4, Column 46: Attribute xmlns:og not allowed here.   xmlns:fb=’http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml’>

This error comes from the Facebook box I have on my site.  Nothing I can do if I want the box.  Move on.  The first 3 errors are all FB box related.  

Error 4)  Line 266, Column 81: Element name g:plusone cannot be represented as XML 1.0.  …g:plusone annotation=”none” href=”http://www.bestdayphoto.com.au/”></g:plusone>

Spend a minute reading that and you’ll see g:plusone  This comes from my Google +1 button.  So, unfortunately, not much I can do there either.  

Best Day Photo has only a few errors because I’ve obviously fixed them.  In anticipation of this post, I took a screenshot of this site’s errors.    Check those results out.  OUCH!  Ok, I’m off to fix them!  (Note: the old site was completely fixed.  Since upgrading to this new theme I hadn’t corrected these errors which brought on this blog post!)

Well, he didn’t believe me or care.  He is stupidlyrich and I’m a lousy hard-working schmoe.  It happens. 

I was right, though.  His search engine company has turned into a bit of a joke.  It had two really great premises:  1) we’re going to focus on blogs and current events and 2)we’re going to offer live previews of a site before you go to it.  

Great…but did I mention I was right? 

Vivozoom, mentioned above, thought they had a great USP: they would only offer images that were absolutely 100% guaranteed to be legal to use.  iStock, Getty, Shutterstock – none offered such a thing.  Once Vivozoom did, they all followed quickly behind, however.   Vivozoom never took off the way it could have because it was far too easy for Google to offer site previews and add “blogs and current events” to their “news” tab. 

That brings us back to the great debate of today:  do new search engines DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha have enough powering them to take on Google?  

• DuckDuckGo has seen their traffic explode as seen on their own page. 
• Wolfram Alpha is integrated into Siri, in the iPhone, which we assume will stay for the near future – thus making them a more household name.

The USP for DDG seems to be that they simply do not track you at all.  Period.  By default, they are not out to track anything about your searches.  Another privacy supporting search engine, Scroogle, seems to have disappeared.   Scroogle piggybacked on Google though.  

What do you think?  Will either of these search engines make big waves in the next few years?  Or will Google’s domination continue?   Which search engine gives you the best results?   Let the search battle continue!   Tweet your replies or leave a comment below.

Blog comments are way down for everyone.  Most of what we all see is spam.  This year I want to ask you a question: why aren’t you commenting on blogs? Not just this one, which gets some, but others as well?  See your excuse below for the reason I believe you should comment more on every great blog you read.

I don’t have time to comment on blogs

I’m assuming you want to comment for SEO and link building.  This is your job we’re talking about.  Leaving one meaningful comment on a useful blog could keep that blogger writing.  It could create a further interaction & possibly friendship that could benefit you much more in the long run.  You’re definitely gaining some SEO benefit, even if the link is nofollow.  (Read my previous post on why comments are *always* good.)

You say you don’t have time.  How long does it really take?  Let’s assume you type really slow and say 30 words per minute.  A 10 word comment would take you 20 seconds.  

• “This is a great article on SEO.  Thanks John!” 
• “Commentstorming works but sometimes my comments get marked as spam.”

Both comments are 10 words or under.   Again, we’re realistically talking about 20 seconds of your time.  You have time.  

I don’t really have anything to add

Everyone I’ve ever met has an opinion on almost every topic possible.  We’re talking about commenstorming here.  You hate spam?  Mention it.  You want more commenters yourself?  Say so.  You don’t open your blog to comments because you’re afraid people will see 0 comments and not say anything?  See, you have an opinion if you have a blog.

Sometimes you’re commenting on a food blog.  You can talk about so many things: the food, the recipe, the story that goes with it, the photos, the author, an ingredient you love or hate.  Realtor blogs about a specific house – ask a question, post about the neighborhood, comment about the photos. You want to comment on Copyblogger but you’re afraid 350+ other comments will overshadow you?  Right now you CANNOT be seen because you aren’t writing.  1 chance in 350 beats 0 chances.  It’s like the lottery sometimes: you can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket.

The blog article didn’t really interest me

As an SEO blog author, I can tell you that my #1 priority is giving you information you can use today and tomorrow to make your business better.  If I’m not doing that, I want to know. 

• “This article is so confusing!”  
• “Your topics lately have become too focused on X.”
• “I came to read about SEO but you’re talking about marketing a bit too much.”  

None of these would take you over 30 seconds to type and I guarantee the blog author wants to know this absolutely critical information.  You aren’t offending them – and if you think you are, send a private message/email.  Blog authors almost always want to connect with their audience so your comments will always be appreciated.

It’s too difficult to comment (logins, etc.)

Honestly, you should tell the blog author!  Make them meet your needs.  We just recently added direct Twitter commenting on our articles (see below) based on a reader’s feedback.  Please try that out!  I love the new feature because it makes things easier for you.  We don’t require you to login to Facebook, Twitter or Blogger to comment.

When blogs make you login, tell them it’s a pain.  Tell them if you’d comment more if they changed the login procedures.  YOU, the reader, are in charge.  But you’re in charge like the people who talk during group meetings.  If you don’t talk, you get no input. If you want something to change, comment.  Giving feedback is a critical part of making a useful blog even better.

I commented on their social media already

Well that was useful for your own SEO wasn’t it?  Wait, no it wasn’t.  Don’t be foolish.  It’s easy to comment on Facebook.  It’s USEFUL to comment on a blog post itself.  Again, if you only read blogs for pleasure this doesn’t apply to you but if this is your business, quit being lazy and taking the easy way out.  Growth requires you to give something.  Give a blog or ten a comment – follow links from other commenters to comment on other related blogs.   How does Tweeting your reply help?  It’s a new conversation – a new introduction to someone, possibly a guest post spot later, inside info you wouldn’t otherwise have, etc.  You need to leverage what you are able to bring to the table.

SEO isn’t an easy job but it does help.  Blog comments may not have the SEO power they once had but they are valuable.  Don’t ignore them because pressing “like” on Facebook is easier.

(You should probably comment or Tweet a reply now.)

We follow between 50 and 75 blogs at any given time using Google Reader and Feedly (Chrome plugin).    I noticed the other day that one of my friend’s blogs hadn’t been updated in “44 days” so I mentioned it.   This conversation should sort of scare you:

M: “Hey, you abandoned that blog huh?  Should I delete the feed?”

F: “Huh?  No, I post on it like EVERY day dude!”

M: “Google Reader doesn’t think so.”

How to audit your RSS feed 

After an hour or so, my friend wrote me back.  ”I added my feed to feedburner a long time ago but then it wasn’t working so I deleted the plugin.  The feed worked again but I guess Google didn’t update the feed.”

Websites should have two things checked regularly – the health of your RSS feed and your contact form.*  (I know, I just lost half of you who decided to go email yourself on your contact form to see if that’s why clients haven’t been writing.)

1) Go toss your feed into the W3C Feed Validator.

If it doesn’t work there, that’s your first sign something is wrong.  

2) Go to your blog manually and click the RSS feed button.  Our is at the very bottom of the page: High on SEO RSS feed.

I know – pesky manual checks.  You really do want readers, right?  If your feed isn’t working from your own site, chances are nobody is seeing it on their reader.  By manually clicking on your rss feed, you will also know what it looks like.   Doesn’t do much good if everyone can see your feed but you’re not giving them good info or the images you want them to see.  Broken rss feeds are no fun.

What should you look for in your feed

Is the feed working?  

Do the images look like you expect them to look?

Do your titles, tags and other important SEO keywords show up where you’d expect?

If you have ads in your rss feed, are they showing up?

If you use feedburner, are you seeing the feedburner subscribe  page or your generic wordpress RSS subscribe page?

Do you see any glaringly obvious issues you need to address?

*Now that your RSS works, go check your contact form.   Oh, you did already?  I knew that.

Some content creators use any excuse or even no excuse at all to litter their blog posts with current events.   These are a few headlines for current events you can find on Google: 

• “Whitney Houston Dead” by Vegas Sports Betting
• “Michael Jackson Dead at 50 – Roulette Wheel Tip” (tagged gambling, betting)

These are both terrible examples of bad content writing.  I won’t link them to give them the SEO benefits, but you can Google them if you’re interested. What about article sites like eHow?  These can be useful, right?   Read this eHow writer’s last paragraph:  I quit eHow.

What about how to make a peanut butter sandwich?

I digress – the Internet is rife with bad articles.  Some relate to news and current events, some don’t.  The point is, don’t write terrible, unrelated articles.  

A BeeGee died today.  If your blog is about music, you should already have a post about this up.  If your blog is about record sales, write about it.  If you cover the NBA, don’t.   Same for Michael and Whitney.  You don’t have to mention them just because it happened but if it happens in your niche, you should write the blog.

How to link current events to your site for SEO

Two things need to be mentioned here first:

1. Use relevant social media to push your topic once the article is written.
2. Link to relevant, authoritative sources, not vegas gambling blackjack .com  Even if they wrote an article.

Ok, let’s get specific now and show how you can use relevant current events to bolster your own SEO.  

On the day Whitney died, you know your music blog post for tomorrow is about Whitney.  So start your research now.  Learn as much as you can about her, her death, the last few years – and her music.  

When you connect the external news stories to your site, do it in context.  

“Today is a sad day.  Whitney Houston is dead.  Buy her last CD here: link.”

No.

“Whitney Houston died today at age 48.  Whitney sold millions of albums, including her last ever disk I Look To You, which  sold over 2 million copies worldwide.  Houston …”  

Good content writers will put links in context.  As we’ve mentioned many times, avoid spam.  Nobody likes spam and nobody wants to read your site if it comes across as one gigantic ad.  

How can you find current events and topics worth writing articles about?

Three great sources for your current events: 

1) CNN.com – yes, some people hate it.  But if it’s world news, or something specific they cover that you follow like politics or sports, you’ll likely find it here. 

2) Twitter trending topics – the fastest way to hear breaking news (sometimes false, so do some fact checking.)   Try this:  local trending topics map.  

3) Google alerts set to your niche.  

Want to see some of this in practice?  Today’s trending topics include: #yolo and #youobviouslyloveoreos so I found out what it was about.   Read about YOLO at the Washington Post or Urban Dictionary.   Many One Direction fans have picked up on YOLO and changed its meaning to “You Obviously Love OneDirection” to which the Oreos response came.  Weird, I know.  That’s the internet today.

If you came to this post on a search for Whitney, Michael, YOLO or One Direction, please comment.  We’d love to know!

This is part 3 of a 4 part series on keyword research for SEO.  Check back every Friday for the next installment.

Part 1 – Keyword Basics & a tool

Part 2 – Competitor Keywords

Two weeks ago we discussed keyword research for SEO and some keywording basics.  Last week we analyzed the keywords our competitors are using to see which are useful and make sure we’re optimized for the best keywords in our niche.  This week we’re moving onto long tail keywords and which you should target.

What are long tail keywords?

Long tail keywords are the keywords and phrases you get search engine traffic from but don’t account for a large portion of your traffic (or target) intentionally.  Let’s take my old market as an example.  I used do wedding photography in Syracuse NY.  My main keywords would have been: 

syracuse wedding photographers
syracuse wedding photographer
syracuse wedding photography
wedding photographer syracuse
wedding photographers syracuse
wedding photography syracuse
photographers in syracuse ny

Google said those were the main keywords so that was our focus (target).  We also had many visitors come via those keywords so we knew that was a large percentage of our traffic as well.

What many marketers forget – big AND small business – is the long tail – the percentage of searches that are not your main keywords that result in great traffic.  

Long tail keywords would be anything not the main.  Think “CNY weddings” or “wedding photographers in Ithaca” or vendor searches that you show up for such as “Greystone Castle wedding photography.”  Anytime you get those, you’re on “long tail” searches.

How do you find long tail keywords?

Statcounter > Click your project, click Keyword Analysis.

Google Analytics > Standard Reporting > Traffic Sources > SEO > Queries (must link your Webmasters account)

What I often found was vendor names came up as part of our traffic.  If we’d shot a wedding at Greystone Castle, in the next year we’d get 15-25 hits for it. Same with our other wedding vendors.   What we also noticed was wedding-related terms.  ”Summer wedding syracuse” and “fall wedding syracuse” were big referrers.  

By using Statcounter you can see the percentage of actual visitors who have searched those keywords and found you.  I usually prefer Statcounter but because of the data in Webmaster Tools, this is one area Google wins BIGTIME.  You can see how many impressions the search had (how many times you showed up on a search page) and your average position on that search.  

How does that translate into visitors and conversions?  

If your main keywords account for 50% of your traffic, the other 50% is untargeted “stuff” you’re just picking up.   If you can enhance those visits, you’ll be capturing even more traffic.  Figure out what people are really searching for and use that to your advantage.  

Unintentional SEO keywords

Our SEO blog shows up on page one for almost every search related to “what page of __________ am I on?”

• What page of Google am I on?
• What page of search am I on?
• What page of Bing am I on?
• What Google page am I on?

and so on…

Why?

One of my first posts on this blog was about a great tool called (ironically) What Page of Search Am I On?

Nearly 20% of my search traffic comes from this keyphrase.   Do you understand how it would be beneficial to a) optimize this page and b) try to find other great searches like it that potential SEO clients may be using?  

How to connect your content to your site

If you’re a frequent reader of the High on SEO tips blog (and you should be) you have likely noticed that we interlink content as often as possible.  For instance, we may be writing the next installment of our keyword research series.   In which case we’d love to tell you about Keyword Research 101 and Keyword Research 102.

When you link content into your own articles, you’re helping the reader.  We want you to find the information you want on our site.  Whether that relates to our SEO pricing, why we do mainly photographers SEO or how to grow your inbound links, we want everything only a click or two away from the article you are currently reading.  If you came in through our Technical Tuesday or our new iPhone app, we want to make sure you can get to the next bit of useful info.

You should want the same for your readers.  If you run a real estate blog, don’t you want readers to find your new post on San Jose housing prices and then go to your San Jose  listings?  Make it easy for readers.  Put the info right in front of them.  Link your content to itself and create a web of links on your own site.  

If you’re a WordPress user, we suggest the Remind Me plugin.  Remind Me creates a box below your main post that shows you recent posts you’ve written.  You can then highlight a term and click “Add link” to simply insert a new link to your existing content.  It’s a very useful WordPress plugin – one we install on all our blogs.

How to connect your content to other sites

So you’ve linked your own content and now you need to get your content on other sites.  How can you manage that?

We already know how to link build and get directory listings (less valuable than ever), small business listings, etc.  The easiest way to connect our content is to spread it socially and find content curators who will help us get our message out.

Social connections are increasingly important.  If you tweet your link and your 500 followers see it and nobody does anything with it, it dies there.  If 5 of those 500 retweet you, you’re getting a little social push.  If another 5 of them have curator newspapers (paper.li or scoop.it) then you’re doing even better.  

One of the ways we’ve started to push our content out is to educate our followers about these services.  If 0/500 know about paper.li, nobody creates a new paper and you’re never in it (thus, no links.)  If you do know someone who curates content using paper.li, try to get on their paper.  Ask!  Or create your own off-site content link.  People love mentions so if you can include some top influencers in your paper, you’ll be ahead of the game.

My favorite paper is one I jokingly created a few years ago called All Matt All the Time.   It pulls posts from my wedding blog, SEO blog, twitter accounts and other feeds that have to do with me.  All of this content updates automatically as long as you get 1 viewer per day or 2 subscribers to the paper.  

Another  new service to help make your content look better is Twylah.   Check ours out here: High on SEO Twylah  This allows people to see what’s going on around your twitter account as well as follow you easily if they don’t already.  Check out Scoop.it and Storify as well.

If you write the next great article, get it out to a few great article services.  I suggest starting with (and probably not going past) the Top 50 Article Directories by Traffic.

Whether you’re an advanced SEO or a small business trying the DIY strategy, you’ve probably read that meta keywords do not help you on SEO.  

Today, we’re going to take that a step further.  It’s possible that meta keywords hurt your SEO on Google.  

How can meta tag keywords hurt you?

Searching Google for “seo” by itself brings up 9 local results + 1 wiki page.   Of the top 10 pages, only 1 has meta keywords.    A search for “restaurant” brings up another 10 pages and only 1 that has meta keywords in the page at all.

By contrast, Bing returns 4/10 that have meta keywords on the “seo” search and 7/10 on the “restaurant” search.

Say what?!

Now, Google and Bing always have different results but with such stark contrasts in their results, you’d want to go at least another search in, right?

Of the top four results for Marketing, 1/4 on Google has meta keywords.  4/4 on Bing have meta keywords.  This is a pattern.  However, because most small sites DO have them, it’s a  pattern mainly in generic keyword searches.  

Does this mean you should remove meta keywords?

The official word from Google is “they simply don’t have any effect on search results.”  

This is both correct AND incorrect as far as what we’re seeing.  When 90% of the top results completely don’t have keyword tags, that says more than “doesn’t help” and strays into “May hurt.”  But why?

Most SEO’s agree that keywords as a percentage of your whole code is a relevant metric to track.  For the sake of argument, let’s say you had 2000 characters of code and 200 meta keyword characters.  Google is *completely* ignoring 10% of your code but (most likely) counting it in the total number of characters.  That means every letter you use reduces your keyword density and your on-page keyword strength.  

If you use a keyword 4 times on a page and you use meta tags, that’s 4/2000 characters.   If you don’t use that meta tag, it’s 4/1800.  

So as always, the floor is yours.  We’d love to hear your (2012) thoughts on meta keywords.  Please don’t rehash the official 3 year old Google post on the subject.  Let’s start from knowing they don’t positively affect us.  Can they hurt?