So I was reading through some SEO material recently (as all good SEOs should do), and found a few interesting things out. I knew that in the past, when the keyword meta tag was first introduced, it was the authority for ranking pages in the SERPs (search engine result pages). You could just put your primary keyword into your keyword meta tag 300 times, and you’d rank at the top.
Of course, this is silly. And most of the search engines realized this before too long. The tag was introduced in 1996, and a lot of changes happened in 1998. One particularly major change – a company named Google. When they came into the game, they didn’t even support the tag. Why? Because of the blatant abuse people did with it. And even to this day, Google doesn’t even acknowledge it. I know this is surprising at least a few of you. So is it even worth using?
Well, although Google doesn’t notice anything you do with your keywords meta tag, there are still search engines that do. Primarily Yahoo and Ask.com. However, the content placed into this tag doesn’t help your rankings much at all. It has about as much SEO power as normal page content.
If I had to give any reason for still using the keywords meta tag, it’d be only to put words that you would never actually use in your content. Primarily common misspellings and phrases that are impossible to use in your normal content, but that people still type when they search. And you’ll only get potential results from those two search engines – not from Google.
So keep your SEO solid, and do some good on-site SEO with the appropriate adjustments, plus good off-site backlinking (which is really where most of the SEO power comes from). And make sure to research as necessary, to find out what really helps (or hurts) your rankings on the SERPs, if you want to be a good SEO.