The Keyword Meta Tag
SEO Myth : The keyword meta tag is important to your search engine rankings.
“Metadata” is data about data. Information that describes the structure, format, size, methods of access, target audience, etc. of information - in our case, web pages.
In the early internet, metadata in the form of “meta tags” was designed to provide a quick and easy way for a page author to tell search engines what the web page was about and who made up the target audience.
The utility of meta tags quickly ebbed as the web became more commercial and site authors realized that by stuffing their meta tags - especially the keyword meta tag - with repetitions of popular keywords they could increase their search engine rankings for those keywords and drive more traffic to their sites.
In the mid-nineties, the popular search engines of the day officially stopped supporting the keyword meta tag - both in response to keyword stuffing and because technology had advanced to the point where other methods of finding out what a web page is about (like indexing the entire content of the page) were both feasible and more effective.
Since then, search engine rankings have increasingly given more and more weight to off-the-page factors like the number and types of sites that link to web pages and less weight to simple metrics like meta tags.
From the perspective of the search engines, whose revenue model revolves around providing the most accurate and relevant search results possible, minimizing the importance of easily manipulated information like meta tags was simply good business.
In fact, many believe the kind of information you include in the keyword meta tag can actually hurt your page rankings as stuffing this tag is a typical first step for newbie search engine optimizers trying to naively manipulate the natural rankings of their pages.
This belief is strong enough that many site authors are leaving the meta keyword tag out of their site altogether.
I still think it’s a good idea to use a keyword meta tag, but would recommend including only the most relevant keyword phrase for the content of your page in the tag.
This is especially important for those of you maintaining legacy html that was created when keyword tag stuffing was en vogue - could that long list of barely relevant keyword phrases in your meta keywords tag actually be hurting the rankings of your pages?
