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Is the Keywords Meta Tag Still Useful for SEO?

Is the Keywords Meta Tag Still Useful for SEO?

Many people who are new to the seo industry come across articles from the 1990s that stress the importance of meta tags.  Such advice is quite outdated.  A lot of search engines do not even look at this tag anymore.  Some of the search engines that do look at this tag, only do so to identify spam.  There are still benefits to including a keywords meta tag for every vital page of your website.

Why Don’t Some Search Engines Use This Tag Anymore?

Back in the early days of the web, the search engines did not rely on links to determine how relevant a website is for a particular keyword.  Instead they primarily looked at on-page factors to determine rankings.  To get rankings and traffic, it was a competition of who could get their target keywords into all the right places of their website.  One key spot to place their target phrases was the keywords meta tag.  For some search engines this was the first on-page location they would check when ranking websites.

The problem with this ranking strategy is that it was extremely simple to manipulate.  Some people would simply copy their competitors meta tags in full.  Other more crafty internet marketers would include hundreds of words in their keyword tag.  The spammier marketers would list countless irrelevant, high traffic keywords – everything from adult to pharmacy keywords.  These people didn’t care how relevant their traffic was; they just wanted traffic volume.  These spammy techniques would work quite well and you could get rankings for nearly any keyword that you included in your meta tags.  It became one of the first search engine optimization techniques that was widely used by spammers. 

Eventually search engines had to ignore this tag because it no longer determined who was relevant.  Who would’ve thought that website marketers wouldn’t be completely honest when making their meta tags?  In a perfect world, search engines could just rely on the honesty of website marketers to determine relevance.  With millions of dollars on the line in some industries, seo professionals pushed the boundaries of what was considered ethical marketing.  Everyone was suddenly in a rush to get a piece of the newfound website fortunes.

Then Why Is the Keywords Meta Tag Still Useful?

Although many search engines stopped relying on this meta tag, others simply place less weight on it.  They would still check to see if a keyword is in this tag, but it was no longer the silver bullet solution.  Including your target keywords in your meta tags still helps rankings on Yahoo and other smaller search engines.  Even if you rely on Google for your traffic, you should not ignore the potential traffic that Yahoo can provide.  You need every bit of help you can get to improve your rankings.

Another benefit of including a keywords meta tag is that it helps keep pages focused on certain keywords.  A content writer could check this tag to see which words to include in their writing.  A link builder could check this tag to see which phrases they should be targeting for link anchor text.

Is There a Downside to Including Meta Keywords?

As long as you don’t try anything spammy with your meta tags, they won’t harm your search engine rankings.  Just ensure that you are only including words that are relevant to the page content.  Ideally all of those words would be included in the page text as well.  Avoid repeating keywords too.  If you get spammy, be prepared for penalties from the search engines in time.

One potential downside that some people are worried about is the competitive intelligence that it provides.  At a glance, competitors could see exactly which phrases a page is targeting.  I don’t give this argument much credit.  Strong competitors can find out your exact target keywords by analyzing your page content and links.  There are even automated tools that provide this analysis.  Really if a competitor needs to see your meta tags to know this information, it is unlikely that they are really a serious competitor.

Jeremy Biberdorf -
About the Author:

Jeremy Biberdorf is an internet marketing professional with over 10 years of experience. Check out his website for low priced paid keyword search tools.

http://www.articlesbase.com/seo-articles/is-the-keywords-meta-tag-still-useful-for-seo-880531.html

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Khonz.com is not a META search Engine!!!

Khonz.com is not a META search Engine!!!

Khonz.com is one of the leading search engine of Bangladesh. According to Khonz Meta tags no longer boost a site’s rankings in search engine queries.

Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.

The keywords attribute

The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements[1]. By late 1997, but, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keywords attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites.

Search engines started dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002, AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.

No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any effect on ranking at any of the major search engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is small to none and in September 2009 Matt Cutts of Google announced that they are no longer taking keywords into account whatsoever.  But, both these articles suggest that Yahoo! still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo! itself claims support for the keywords meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings.

The description attribute

Unlike the keywords attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo and Bing, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query). The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page’s content. This allows the Web page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be showed if the search engine was unable to automatically make its own description based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, showed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages. W3C doesn’t specify the size of this description meta tag, but nearly all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text

Meta tags are part of a website’s codes, which give extra information about the site to search engines. Meta tags are comprised of keywords that summarize what the site is about. This information is delivered to the search engine, which in turn will possess an thought about the main topics of the site.

Traditionally, search engine use Meta tags to choose if a particular site is relevant to a particular search. Theoretically, that makes these tags vital for search engine algorithms. But, Khonz emphasized that these Meta tags have no relevance to search engine optimization (SEO).

Research on recent trend, Khonz stopped making Meta tags an SEO factor upon learning that some websites started misusing them (i.e. when sites use Meta tags that are not relevant just to strengthen its search engine campaign).

Engr. Rajib Roy -
About the Author:

Engr. Rajib Roy
He is the chief developer of this project, working in a British Software company as a Sr. Programmer and now living in U.A.E. Crawler, the heart of this search engine is completely developed by his own hand and he is still trying to develop it more.

After completing his graduation in Electrical and electronic engineering he starts his carrier in IT field with some innovative project. He likes logic and like to solve problem in different logical way.
www.khonz.com

http://www.articlesbase.com/information-technology-articles/khonzcom-is-not-a-meta-search-engine-1286789.html