Meta Keywords – Still Useful?
By: John Elder posted in SEO
Hello good people!
Since far back in the distant past of ancient SEO history (well, since 1996 or so…) there have been three main meta tags that every SEO has worried about and worked with.
These are the:
- Title Meta Tag
- Description Meta Tag
- and the Keyword Meta tag
Meta tags go between the <head> and </head> tag of your web page’s HTML document and are meant to help the search engines get a better picture of what your web site is all about.
A typical Meta tag (in this case a keyword meta tag) looks something like this:
<meta name=”keyword” content=”SEO, search engine optimization, meta keyword tags, search engine ranking, SEO marketing, web optimization”>
Back in the day, search engines were stupid. They couldn’t really figure out what your web site was all about on their own. So they would scan those Meta tags and use that information to index your site on their search engine.
Everyone was happy.
Then us evil SEO types realized that we could manipulate how a site gets ranked by manipulating those Meta tags. The more sinister among us started stuffing those tags with useless words that didn’t really relate to what the web page was about, but that got searched for a lot at the search engines.
Bad SEO bad….not quite “Black Hat” but definitely “Dark Gray”.
Search engines quickly figured this out, made some changes, evolved into more complex beasts, and so today you can’t just stuff keywords into those tags to get a good search engine ranking.
That’s not to say those Meta tags aren’t still useful. The Title tag and the Description tag both play a major part in how the search engines present your web site on their results pages…which can help searchers click your link as opposed to someone else’s link when running a search. They won’t help your ranking, per se, but they will help your site traffic.
But what about the Keyword Meta tag?
Is it still useful? Do the search engines still use it? Should we even care?
The short answer is….uh…I don’t think it’s still useful. And I don’t think that the search engines still use it. And I don’t think we should care!
How’s that for qualifying an answer?!
The search engines don’t seem to use it anymore and it doesn’t seem to be useful in anyway that I can determine. Still a lot of SEO types still use the keyword meta tag. Old habits are hard to break. Their thinking seems to be
”Well, the search engines don’t use it anymore….but it couldn’t hurt, and we’re used to doing it…so let’s just keep using it.”
I guess you can’t argue with that. I stopped using it completely. I haven’t used it on this web site at all and we’re ranking just fine, even though we are a very new site. I haven’t read or seen any definitive research that proves one way or another…but I’m inclined to forget about it forever and I suggest you do to.
But if you really just can’t let go, the free All-in-One SEO WordPress Plugin will create keyword meta tags for you. And I guess it couldn’t hurt (for now!).
-John Elder
The Marketing Fool!
