A lot has been made of the “Meta Keywords” for a website. In the SEO department, we get asked a lot about how the Meta Keywords section should be written, what it does and how much impact it has. I frequently find myself on the phone with a client and then find myself explaining that an SEO Review has a lot more to it than tweaking the Meta Keywords section of a website. Today, I would like to talk about site Meta Keywords and what impact they have on site visibility within search engines, as well as what we here at CoachingWebsites have learned about Meta Keyword behavior.

First off, I want to point out that there are several kinds of “Meta” tags. To be labeled a Meta tag something just needs to be p art of the site without necessarily being visible on the page or impacting how the page functions. There are Meta Keywords, Meta Descriptions, Meta Titles, Meta Robots. All of these tend to fill a different role in Search Engine visibility and have very different standards for usefulness. Today, I really want to focus on Meta Keywords and we can come back to the others in a later blog.

Meta Keywords are literally just a list of words that describe the site succinctly for a Search Engine’s robots. They were created in the early days of the modern Internet (think 1992-ish) as a means of helping the rather primitive search engines of the time identify relevant aspects of a search. Search Engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista depended so heavily on Meta data to rank sites that people began entering commonly searched words into the Meta Keywords section of the site as a means of driving user traffic. Meta Keywords remained important because the crawler robots–a kind of computer program that examined websites for relevancy–weren’t sophisticated enough to go without them.

All of that changed with Google. Google introduced crawlers that were complicated enough and “smart” enough to ignore meta-data and still get everything they needed to produce a complete sense of a website’s relevancy to a search. By 2002, Google’s success at producing search results that didn’t contain the level of spam previously found had earned them a large market share (see Tim’s blog for more on that) and forced everyone else to respond. With the end of AltaVista’s use of Meta Keywords in generating search results, the Death of the Meta tag was declared. While it turns out that the declaration of the death of all meta tags was a tad bit hasty, it really was the death of the Meta Keyword.

You see, the fact of the matter is that Meta Keywords just don’t hold the level of relevancy that they used to. Most major search engines don’t appear to use them at all. Google in particular has made much of this fact. Despite the fact that most studies of this have confirmed that Google isn’t lying and that Meta Keywords are largely ignored by them, many people, including some full-time SEO companies, continue to put a lot of stock in them, likely because of their former usefulness.

Other Meta tags are still very important. As the link above mentions, Meta Description is still used to describe a site when listing the search results and Meta Robots tags are still read to allow for no indexing of the page. Meta Titles, often called the Search Engine Title tag, are still very important and have, to some extent, become what Meta Keywords once were in terms of importance and usefulness.

Does this mean you should just delete the Meta Keywords section in your site? Not really. In fact these are still useful, even if they don’t seem to matter for Bing and Google. An experiment conducted by a British SEO firm seemed to bear out the secretly-harbored notion that Yahoo! is still using Meta Keywords. While the experiment conducted was not the most rigorous test possible, it does a very good job of highlighting the idea that Google and Bing don’t rely on Meta Keywords and Yahoo! probably does. You can read the full text of the experiment here. Of course, with the Yahoo! – Bing search partnership even this could be changing. Either so that Bing uses Meta keywords or Yahoo! doesn’t, but as yet it stills seems to be worth it to use them.

So in conclusion, it seems as though the importance of Meta Keywords has diminished a lot over the time the Internet has been around, but their shelf life is not entirely past. It is still important to organize this section of your site to include a few key phrases related to your practice, but one shouldn’t be obsessing over it. It certainly isn’t the most important part of the SEO process, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. If you have any more questions about this or any other SEO issue just call us at CoachingWebsites and choose SEO from the phone options and speak to a specialist today.

John D – CoachingWebsites Support
Email any questions to [email protected]