Meta Keywords

This is a hard one – you will hear a large amount of conflicting information about meta keywords if you are doing your research online, and this is for a very simple reason – the search engines shifted the rules on keywords a few years back (and are equally as likely to shift them again in the future), so if you are reading an article which is a few years old, or you are reading an article written by somebody who doesn’t know all the facts then they will be telling you that your meta keywords are a vital ingredient which you MUST get perfect every time. Equally, a more recent article may tell you to ignore them altogether as many engines take no notice of them. Our view is somewhere in between……

Your Meta Keywords – ARE They important?

Lets put it this way. If you only have a very limited amount of time for your SEO, and you have to ditch one aspect in order to get it all done, then your meta keywords are probably the least effective element and should probably be the first things you drop. BUT if you are not restricted for time then take the opportunity to work on them. In a worst case scenario they can’t hurt, in a best case scenario they could give you that competitive edge which makes the difference between second and first spot in your keyword rankings. On a major keyword that could equal thousands of pounds of potential revenue per month for your business, so if you have the time then put the effort in!

What IS a meta keyword?

Your meta keywords are a very rare animal indeed. They will NEVER be seen by a visitor in their web browser (unless they try to view the source of your web pages). This is why they are easy to overlook. However, we encourage you to now right click on this page and click “View Source”. You are now looking at the raw HTML which makes this page – the code which tells your browser how to display it to you. Near the top you will see a chunk of code starting with

<meta name="keywords" content="

. Put simply, this is a comma seperated lists of words which are relevant to this particular page of your site. Now, the search engines used to set great store by this tag, and would automatically index your page under any word which featured in the list. Then certain disreputable spammers decided to put irrelevant words into their meta keywords in order to attract visitors from high volume search terms. Obviously end users who were searching got extremely annoyed by this (imagine searching for cat food and landing on a page about Viagra), so after a couple of modifications the major search engines decided to all but disregard this particular tag. Yahoo interestingly enough never decided to make this move so DO still take notice of the meta keywords tag.

What to put in your meta keywords

A common mistakes with meta keywords is to repeat the same words in multiple phrases – i.e. “meta keywords, keywords tag, meta tag”. This is keyword stuffing, and will actually do you more harm than good. The search engines are intelligent enough to join your words in combinations, so entering “meta, keywords, tag” will cover all of the above three examples and many more besides. As mentioned above, Yahoo still uses this tag, and with over 20% market share of search traffic, this is a not insignificant source of traffic to ignore. For that reason alone we believe you SHOULD use meta keywords if at all possible. In addition whilst Bing and Google state that they ignore the tag, the words themselves will help to add relevance to your page and increase your keyword density – both good things in terms of your overall SEO strategy.

Hopefully this article has helped explain what meta keywords are and how they work for you. If you have asked us to complete your SEO on your behalf then you dont need to worry about this, we will guide you through it all (although having the knowledge yourself can never hurt). If you are doing your own SEO then we hope that the article explains everything for you, but please feel free to use the comment form below to ask us any further questions, or contact us to ask about how your SEO can be improved through effective use of meta keywords