What is the value of keywords in SEO?

[Erick]

So here's my understanding of the importance of keywords:

When you do an SEO campaign you research keywords that you will use throughout your website. e.g. If you have a auto repair shop that specializes in Mercedes, you might use keywords such as "Mercedes repair", "fix Mercedes", "Auto repair in (name of city)" etc. etc.

Those keywords are used throughout the website in the different things being talked about. This shows google (and the searcher) that your page is relevant to what was searched (for example someone searches Mercedes repair and gets your website).

This all makes good sense to me. But I was recently told that Google does not use Keywords... I don't know what that means...

So I looked into this further and found that Google does not use keywords meta tag in web ranking. What does this mean?

[Jake]

That meta tag is a list of keywords one embeds in the site code to indicate what it's about, unfortunately too many people cheated claiming things like a site selling loans was about employment, to avoid being manipulated be unscrupulous web site operators Google examines the actual site content to identify it's subject matter.

(By some go to the extreme of cloaking the real site content and showing an alternative version when they see the Google spider is visiting, cloaking is a sure way to get banned eventually)

[Peter Nikolow]

Yes- you're correct. On August Google updated their engine with something called Hummingbird. After 5 months there is no exactly glue what's happening (sites are up or down). But so far few things become crystal clear:
- Hummingbird try to understand what you're asking
- Hummingbird index pages by meaning of text
- Hummingbird rely on semantic web also in local searches
You can evaluate rest on link below.

Before "optimizers" wrote 100s pages filled with keywords to catch all keyword combinations and get user in site. Now this technique is considered as spam. Now you should wrote content and link with semantic web to get better ranking.

[Thomas]

Keyword are major part to generate higher traffic and a basic element to catch crawlers attention.Keyword analysis is just a part of internet marketing. It's particularly relevant with on-line marketers, freelance article writers and people. Relevant keyword provided by the keyword analyst, they just discover and choose greater keyword phrases which are suitable for your site. The popularity of suggested related phrases using various data sources such as; Word tracker, Scribe SEO, Word Stream and Google Ad words. It also provides convenient links to a variety of third party tools, such as Google Trends, Google traffic estimator and Go Rank’s related keyword tool for additional insight.