How should I use Meta Keywords on my site?

Posted by Martin Jamieson | March 12, 2008 .

One of the most popular questions asked by beginners is how to use the Meta Keywords tag on your website…. I thought I’d put together a little background and perspective on the topic.

The Meta Keywords tag has a rather long and dark history when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. In 1995, popular search engines Infoseek and AltaVista used the contents of the keywords tag as a significant factor in their search engine algorithms, by 1997, spam was showing up in plague proportions. Unscrupulous webmasters relied on tactics such as keyword stuffing and using unrelated, popular keywords to help drive traffic to their websites.

By the year 2000, nearly all relevance for the meta keywords tag was removed by the major search engines, AltaVista and Inktomi were the last to finally remove it from their algorithms in 2002. You can find out more about the history and details about all tags in the meta element at Wikipedia.

Will they ever be used by search engines in the future? Is there any point to including them on your website?

There is some debate as to whether they are used today or not - if they are, it can only be a very small effect and only for those keywords the search engine otherwise determines are related to the actual content of the page. It’s hard to see them ever coming back in a significant way, they are too easy to abuse, but even a small advantage can be worth it at times and that’s about the only thing keeping the meta keywords tag alive.

My advice to you is to keep it a pretty low priority - you can include a meta keywords tag if you like, keep it to say 5 or 6 kewords, comma separated and make them relevant to your content. It’s best practice, but it probably won’t do much for your rankings, so the amount of time you spend on this task should be minimal.

The Meta Description tag is however another matter altogether… I’ll talk about that next time.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Marketing, Meta Keywords