Originally posted August 30, 2006, and updated today. This article is a brief series on individual meta tags and their impact on SEO, today’s feature, the meta keyword tag.
The year is 2004, smart SEOs noted the importance of keywords and also enjoyed the use (and for some abuse) of the keyword meta tag. For those of you unaware of what the keyword meta tag looks like here is an example below:
meta content="keyword 1, keyword2, etc." name="keywords"
The smart SEO in 2004 used 3-5 unique keyword phrases on each page, the leading search engines respected and used the tags as a contributor in their ranking system, and everyone was happy. But that was then and this is now, 3/4 through 2006, how then should we deal with the keyword meta tag in today’s SEO world?
You’ve probably heard you should either drop meta keyword tags completely, or continue to use them. Savvy SEOs do both, a combination of either or, or one but not the other–talk about a consensus! Currently the trend (updated November 2007) is this: leading search engines do not use the keyword meta tag as a determinant in their rankings. It is safe to bypass the tag all together in creation of new pages. In the very least if you have the tag in some form of automated generation make sure they are unique.
1) Some SEOs say leave keyword meta tags out completely, don’t include them because they are simply a waste of your time investment. Put your keyword meta tag creation into content creation or something of greater value. This makes sense especially if you have 15,000 pages in need of unique keyword tags.
2) Other SEOs still, out of good practice, implement keyword tags. They still follow a sound and responsible format and would rather put the extra time into writing the tags then face whatever downside there is for leaving them out (if there is one.)
3) Webmasters can actually be penalised for creating keywords that are useless/spammy. I still see irresponsible webmasters (I’m not going to call them SEOs) loading their meta tags with over 10 keywords.
Let me give you an example of a fictitious company in the ‘web hosting’ industry. A poorly written meta keyword tag (and believe me, a large percentage of webmasters do this) may look something like this:meta content=”web, web hosting, hosting, ip, internet, free hosting, internet host, web host, host, intranet, etc.” name=”keywords”
If you decide to write tags here are some rules to help (noting that the above is a BAD example).
1) Keep your tag short, 3-5 keyword phrases max.
2) Meta keyword phrases are built around your keyword research and reflects your on page content.
3) Don’t stuff your keyword tag with keywords you can’t compete with. IP, Web, Internet, from the example above, are useless.
The items you should consider before creating tags are: 1) keyword meta tags are rarely used for any purpose with any search engine but are still 2) are seen and recorded by search engines. If you decide to not include them we can’t find evidence you will be penalised for the exclusion. However, it appears you should be worried about these tags if you’ve abused them in the past and still are.
However, at the end of the day, you can save yourself the time investment by knowing you can safely remove these tags all together from your SEO arsenal.
[tags]meta, meta keywords, keywords tag[/tags]