I’ve seen an essay on the net stating the meta tag for keywords is no longer necessary, i.e. Google’s web crawlers are so sophisticated that they will pick up on the keywords in a web page w/o the keyword meta tag. Is this true? Should I take all the meta tags for keywords out of my code?
Thanks.
When Google came on to the scene, meta keywords rapidly became useless as a page-ranking mechanism. You can keep them in there for other reasons, but for search engine optimization they aren’t of any use at all.
We also have a Search Engine Optimization forum where you can get many more details about such things.
They might not be nearly as effective as they were in 1999 but I still add them to be on the safe side… why not?
It depends what value you put on your time. Adding keywords does take some time - admittedly not a lot, but non-zero nonetheless. If it achieves nothing (which is pretty much the case), you’re spending time for no reason.
A while back, I can’t remember where, I saw a study that showed that google and other search engines were still using the keywords meta, but only if you met specific qualifications. (I think it was on SEOWorkers, one of the few out there in the field that doesn’t reek of “scam”)…
It was something like 8 or 9 keywords only, less than 128 characters total, with zero redundancy and 100% relevance to the text on the page.
Which makes sense from an efficiency standpoint – EVERY word on a page can’t be a keyword… a “phrase” is not a keyword… and if a “keyword” isn’t present on the page – it’s probably NOT relevant to the page. Setting cutoff limits to how/why/when it’s relevant would make the people who blow a full 1k on a couple hundred words think it doesn’t work anymore, when it’s their ridiculous keyword stuffing that’s shtupping them.
In general I include them on my pages, using the above and treating it like a word jumble – again it’s called keywords, so using phrases doesn’t make any sense. I’ll often see things like:
content=“web development, web servers, server development, html programming, web programming, server programming”
on and on and on for a k or 2 of code… when
content=“web,development,server,programming,html”
works JUST as good, if not better. keyWORDS… It’s been my experience there’s no need to restate the same words in phrase after phrase, no need to state plurals as the engines seem smart enough to pick up on that – keyWORDS… phrase stuffing is one of the things that made search engines devalue them in the first place!
… and if those words do not appear in the body text of your document, they have no business being in your keywords meta! – aka zero relevance.
If you use SEOWorkers tool, it will tell you much the same thing:
Free SEO Analysis Search Engine Optimization Tool - SEO Workers
It kvetches when your metas are uselessly long and don’t have relevance to the page.
If I recall correctly, that type of search was only possible from a certain search engine developed in-house at a certain university.
Is this the one?
Boston University | Search | Help | Special Searches
Page title and the url plays vital role in google indexing. Google doesnt consider the meta description and meta keywords of the website. Also, it is essential to use the H1, H2… tags effectively to reflect the main keywords.
While targeting keywords for a page try to work on 2 or 3 organic keyword per page and rest in the inner pages. More you try to mix up the keywords the theme of the page gets diluted and may not come up for any of the keywords.
But they do use it when displaying search results, so it’s a good thing to plant on your page - a straightforward, simple, declarative sentence that describes what your site is all about can certainly attract someone to the listing for your site on the SERP.