What are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are in the <head> section of every website and includes information that doesn’t appear on the webpage itself. The tags are informational for the search engines, your browswer or to give authoring type of data. There are many different metatags including tags that direct the search engines to either spider a page or not, tags that tell the search engines the natural language of the site and meta tags that will tell your browser to redirect to a different page. There are two pieces of meta data designed for the search engines that are, or have been, used for search engine optimization:
The Meta Description Tag: This tag is very important for SEO. It is often used as the description on the SERP.
The Meta Keywords Tag: This is the topic of this post and is highly insignificant in the search engine algorithms.
What is the Keyword Meta Tag?
The Keyword Meta Tag, or the keyword tag as it is sometimes referred, is a piece of Meta Data used by website owners to tell the search engines what a web page is about. The tag was originally designed to list keywords that are relevant to the site rather than describing the site in a paragraph format. Here is the format of the Keyword Meta Tag:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4″>
The comma between keywords is sometimes omitted.
Some History of the Keyword Meta Tag
In about 1995, when the search engines started to appear, the Keyword Meta Tag was THE tag used to rank web pages. AltaVista and InfoSeek, the top engines of the time ranked webpages within their SERP entirely by the information provided by website owners within the Keyword Tag. This form of algorithm worked well until spammers, specifically adult sites, realized that they could put all of their important phrases into this tag many, many times and they would ourrank the competition. They also soon discovered that they could also stuff other non-relevant phrases into the keyword tag. They were able to get their site in front of people that weren’t searching for them. I still remember quite clearly searching on AltaVista for almost anything and the first few pages of results were unrelated porn sites. It didn’t matter what you searched for from ‘flowers’ to ‘automobiles’, adult sites always appeared in the results.
In about 1998, led by the new kid on the block, Google, most of the engines stopped using the Keyword Meta Tag due to this SPAM and the search engine battle started. The engines realized that the keyword tag was the main reason that their results were not relevant. They began to use the actual content of the sites as the driving force in their SERP.
The Keyword Tag With Today’s Search Engines
Most search engines ignore the Keyword Meta Tag. Many site owners don’t realize this and one of the top mistakes of new website owners that are trying to optimize their own sites is the overuse of this tag. They believe that if they just put all of their keywords into this tag, they’ll be found.
It is believed that there are a few smaller meta-crawlers that do support the keyword tag. If they do support it, they don’t put much weight on it, rather, it is used in conjunction with the content on your web page. It would be used to reinforce the information on your page. If you are going to include the Keyword Meta Tag, it is good practice not to include phrases that are not within the content of the web page. If the phrase isn’t on the page, it won’t help you get ranked by putting it in the keyword tag.
I think that there may some exceptions. If there are some common synonyms of your top phrases or mispellings of things such as your company name, it may… and I say may in a big way… such as maybe, possibly, a slim chance… that it may be a benefit to include those words.
Many top ranked webpages don’t even use the Keyword Meta Tag. Many SEO specialists believe that it is a waste of time to create and implement the tag believing that the time spent could be used in a more productive way.
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