Tag: Meta Tags

Back in February, I wrote up a blog post discussing how to develop a keyword strategy for SEO. In that article, I discuss how keyword-spamming has changed how you should select your keywords. To recap: a long time ago, website owners were putting scores of keywords in their keywords meta tag - often keywords that were irrelevant to the content on the page itself. Search engines quickly picked up on this, and realized that website owners aren't the best source of information when deciding what a specific page should rank for (they are after all, bias). So search engines began placing less emphasis on this meta tag and looking at other, more accurate ways to rank content.

I've long advised my friends and clients that the keywords meta tag is optional (and can be used as good practice) because its most likely ignored. Others have suspected the same for quite some time. So I was happy to see a post on the Official Google Webmaster blog that confirmed that Google does not use the keyword meta tag for web ranking.

Here's a quick snippet from that post:

Q: Why doesn't Google use the keywords meta tag?

A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called "off-page" factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

And here is the video. Matt Cutts of Google also addressed the issue on his blog (which I highly reccomend you subscribe to if you're interested in SEO).

Keep in mind - this doesn't mean the concept of keywords (short phrases) are useless. In fact, keyword researching is critical to a successful SEO strategy. But the actual keywords meta tag does nothing to help your position with Google. Instead, you should use your keyword research to build relevant content, a strong description tag, and good anchor text in your backlinks and internal link structure.