exactly nikigor. The current strategy is to get great rankings in all locations, even if you have nothing to do with some of them (like before).

I think the average ranking is a reflection of actual impressions. Like when someone searched and the position they saw (the impression) counts as 1. I just say that based on impressions because that's a stat they provide next to it, and because rankings can still be different from same data centers for different people. But to be honest I'm guessing. You could be right.

LOL, ain't that the truth!

Hey Sam, Your point is VERY true. That's why it's the 1st point of part 3 of this series.

Agreed. Too much work sometimes..

That's still one of my favorites as well.

You're right. There's not too many reasons to add the keywords meta's. But here are a couple weird reasons, I still do.
It's an HTML standard
Maybe it's considered i other factors (link backlink profiling)
Maybe the search engines ecretly count them
If you have them there, sometimes directories and social bookmarking sites will automatically recognize them (for convenience)
Smaller search engine still use them.
just because.
But no reason to stress on how good they are. Most of the time, I just throw whatever I'm feeling about that page at the time. Sometime ultra relevant, sometimes spammy, sometimes with a purpose..

:)

Back in the day, having too much html, scripts, coding, extra tables, etc compared to what users could see wasn't good for SEO. But nowadays, even the bests sites have too much scripting to get dock for it. Don't think its as big of a factor as it used to be. But could be making a come back.

Very good advice to always keep in mind Steve. Thanks

That's a funny question, only a full blog post can answer ;)