I still hear from a lot of SEOs that are convinced the keywords meta tag actually makes a difference.  Well, I thought I’d run a full test to see how much attention the search engines pay to it.

The test was as follows: I put a random string of letters and numbers together and slapped it into my keywords meta tag.

Keywords Meta Tag Test

Keywords Meta Tag Test

So there it is.  And I let the engines go out and gobble up my site.  After the robots had all crawled it, I did a check to see what each search engine found.  And this might surprise you, but here you go:

Google Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Google Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Yahoo Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Yahoo Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Bing Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Bing Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Ask.com Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

Ask.com Keywords Meta Tag Test Results

And as you can see for yourself – only Yahoo and Ask seem to pay any attention to the keywords meta tag.  Not only that, but it was very recently revealed that Yahoo will no longer use the keywords meta tag.

So, as I’ve said before – the keywords meta tag is only used by people who have not done the research to realize that it doesn’t do anything.  For SEO, keep your optimizing solid – use the primary elements, the title tag, the description tag, header tags where valid.  But remember to target humans, not just the search engines.  If you keep that in mind, you’ll likely find yourself in better positions on the search engine results pages.