Wed 2 Jul 2008
What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula?
Blurb by ShaunTIP 2Ahh, a bastian of crap and unethical seo companies - the meta-keywords tag! How many crap seo companies mention cleaning and optimising this tag in their presentations? Companies that waste time on these waste clients money.
<meta name="Keywords" content="seo, search engine optimisation, optimization" /
I have one piece of advice with the meta keyword tag, which like the title tag, goes in the head section of your web page, forget about them.
If you are relying on meta-keyword optimisation to rank for terms, your dead in the water. From what I see, Google ignores them or at least places no weight in them to rank websites. I hear rumours Yahoo and MSN might read them, but really, a seo has more important things to worry about than this nonsense.
What about other search engines that use them? Hang on while I submit my site to those 75,000 engines first lol 
Yes, 10 years ago search engines liked looking at your meta-keywords (those were the days!). I’ve seen OPs in forums ponder which is the best way to write these tags - with commas, with spaces, limiting to how many characters….
Forget about meta-keyword tags - they are a pointless pointless waste of time and bandwidth. Could probably save a rain-forest with the bandwidth costs we save if everybody removed their keyword tags
I’ll be removing most of mine shortly to do my bit for the environment, and I certainly don’t waste valuable client time putting them in new sites. Even (maybe especially) if I can auto-generate them.
Tin Foil Hat Time
So you have a new site….. you fill your home page meta tags with the 20 keywords you want to rank for - hey, that’s what optimisation is all about, isn’t it?
You’ve just told Google by the third line of text what to sandbox you for And wasn’t meta name=”Keywords” originally for words that weren’t actually on the page that would help classify the document?
I had better take this tin foil hat off because now I am thinking if everybody removed them and stopped abusing Google would probably start looking at them but that’s the way of things in search engines.
Ignore them. Not even a ’second order’ effect, in my opinion - and that’s all this is, remember.
Thanks for visiting the Hobo SEO Blog! Why not subscribe to our Feed for free search engine optimisation tips?
What are your thoughts on using keyword meta for typos and mis-spellings?
Shout Out by Mick — July 3, 2008 @ 10:16 am
Good question. I read somewhere once that this might be useful, but if I really want to rank for a misspelling, I’ll get links to the page with misspellings in them from forums and the like - I think this works better
Shout Out by Shaun — July 3, 2008 @ 10:28 am
I like it. I was at a meeting yesterday with a potential new client pitching for their business, they had pages and pages of meta tag descriptions they were writing because their current SEO asked them too!! It’s a funny world out there.
Question for you: I believe that the skill of an SEO is based on their ability to deliver results for their clients, assuming these techniques are all white hat, do you believe that this industry requires an accreditation/set standards to cut the wheat from the chaf? Or the customers should take more responsibility and refine their buying criteria?
Shout Out by Mike — July 11, 2008 @ 10:42 am
[...] While you are it, fill your <Keywords> tag with relevant keywords. Relevancy here means that every word within <Keywords> metatag must somehow appears somewhere within the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance and considered bad for your ranking. What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? [...]
Pingback by SEO Tips for Beginners — August 28, 2008 @ 5:41 pm