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Don’t worry about keyword meta tag but be sincere about your keyword

Written on November 29, 2009 | Posted in SEO Tips |

meta tags1 Don’t worry about keyword meta tag but be sincere about your keyword I think keyword meta is one of the most suggested factor in Search engine optimization (SEO) world. When I started learning SEO, I also taught to have a keyword meta tag in between <head> … </head> from some SEO expert’s blog or written books. Even still experts suggesting to have keyword meta tag & a popular old technique is to use keywords repeatedly in keywords meta tag in order to get high ranking.
But for the last few years experts became to realize that keyword meta tag do not work for SEO and some of them started a controversy.

But finally last week Google officially declared that Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking. According to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”

Matt Cutts, head of the web spam team also dropped a short video here where he explains more.

Before forwarding into deep I would like to explain keword meta tag in brief for those who are not familiar with it.

What is “Keyword meta tag”?

You may know web pages are written with HTML. Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. Meta tags can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest.

Meta tags go within the header area of any web pages. A typical head might look like this:

<head> <title>Welcome To Electronicworkshop!</title> <meta name=”description” content=”All about SEO,SEM,SMO /> <meta name=”robots” content=”noodp” /> <meta name=”keywords” content=” seo,sem,smo” /> </head>

The header is the section that begins <head> and ends </head> inside <html>… </html>.

So keyword meta tags define the niche of your site or main topic of your site or any specific article.

History of “Keyword meta tag” :

Search engines have been around since 1993. The dream was to enable their “bots” to spider the web more effectively by indexing using something (metadata) within web pages. As early as 1994, search engine bots were already indexing entire pages.

The first major crawler-based search engines to use the meta keywords tag were Infoseek and AltaVista in early 1996. When Inktomi launched in mid-1996 through the HotBot search engine, it also provided support for the tag. Lycos did the same in mid-1997, taking support up to four out of the seven major crawlers at the time (Excite, WebCrawler and Northern Light did not provide support).

The ascendancy of the tag did not last after 1997. Experience with the tag has showed it to be a spam magnet. Some web site owners started inserting misleading words about their pages, and some would use excessive repetition of words in hopes of tricking the search engines into thinking their pages were more relevant.

Lycos stopped supporting the tag in 1998, and newer search engines such as Google and FAST never added support at all. When Infoseek ended in 2000, only AltaVista and Inktomi remained. AltaVista then joined the crowd and stopped supporting the keyword meta tag In July 2002.

death of meta tags Don’t worry about keyword meta tag but be sincere about your keyword

Since that time, Inktomi was rolled up into Yahoo, which continues to support the meta keywords tag as part of its Yahoo search engine.

Now, do we need to avoid keywords meta tag?

I still use keywords on my sites, I know they have no importance but it is a habit. I however don’t do keywords for every page.

There are still people in the SEO community who wrongly say that none of the major search engines use the keywords meta tag. Both Ask and Yahoo! still seem to look at it, but of course they don’t allow it to have significant influence in competitive queries.

I have been telling my clients not to worry about meta-tags anymore but suggest them to have.Google is not the only search engine out there that people use! But regardless of that, I still teach my clients to include the keywords and description as an exercise in keyword density. It keeps them focused on remembering to use their targeted keywords within their content.

I agree that the meta tags don’t directly effect page rank, but they do increase Google’s awareness of the content on the page… which in turn can effect where your site ranks based on the words used in your “natural search” done on Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. This is especially true for flash sites that don’t use technologies that allow search engines to read their pages.

Best Practice: Sincere about your keywords:

Now we finally confirmed that Google don’t place any weight for rank on keyword meta tags. It doesn’t mean that you totally forget about the keyword. Obviously “No”. Though google declared that they ignore the keyword meta tag but their main arms are the keywords that you use in your content.

Google is basically saying, we focus on CONTENT wherein “keywords” are appropriately used, along with a well-written META DESCRIPTION (which should likely should use some of the same “keywords” used in the CONTENT). When writing a Meta Description, think “what is unique about THIS page”, and make sure that the same subject is presented well in the content.

Another Important thing is the presence of keyword in anchor text. If the keyword isn’t in the page but a link from another page has the keyword then the backlink will help your site to be rank high for that keyword.

What about other meta tags?

Google does support several other meta tags. This meta tags page documents more info on several meta tags that we do use. For example, we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets, as this screenshot shows:

meta description Don’t worry about keyword meta tag but be sincere about your keyword
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.