What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?
This Meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and Meta
description tags in the section of your pages'
HTML code, like this: your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS
title goes here
If this Meta tag were a
child, it would be put into a foster home due to all the abuse
it has received over the years! Once upon a time, in the
prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), Meta keyword tags were
a great little tool for the search engines to use to help them
determine how to rank sites in their search results. When the
engines' databases were small, this Meta tag was a quick, easy
method to help decide which keywords might be important on a
site. However, as always happens with anything this simple,
people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put
keywords into the Meta tag that had nothing to do with the
content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were
searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that
word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to
their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex!
Personally, I don't quite understand that logic, because it
brings in untargeted visitors but apparently the goal was to
bring in traffic, period. Over time, less and less weight was
given to poor abused Meta tags, and more and more weight was
given to the actual content of the pages. Today the Meta keyword
tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly
irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed
for time and had to give up one Meta tag, this would be the one
to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words
within these Meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a
minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of
your Web pages. Since the search engines use a wide variety of
factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank
high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available
to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore
you should certainly use Meta tags (including the Meta keyword
tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique
available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those
engines that still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your
rankings (unless you brazenly keywords stuff them). I still use
these Meta tags on clients' Web sites, but don't bother with
them on my own sites.
What Should I Put in these Meta Tags? First let's recap what
needs to be done before you attempt to create Meta keyword tags
(ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever
created):
* Choose your relevant keywords. * Write the site's content
based on these keywords. * * Create a title tag using the same
keywords. * Create a Meta description tag as a marketing
sentence, also based on these keywords. Once you do the above
things properly, putting together your Meta keyword tag is a
very simple procedure. I usually begin putting the keywords I
used in the title of my page in the Meta keyword tag. The first
words in any tag are assumed to be given more weight, so these
are most important. Then I go through each paragraph of text on
the page and take any important phrases that might be used in
the copy and paste them into the Meta keyword tag. I usually
separate the phrases with a comma and no space. This is simply a
personal preference. Using no commas at all in this tag is
basically the same thing, since most engines appear to treat
commas as a space. After I get every important word or phrase
from the text on the page, I add some common misspellings of
some of these same words. I know for a fact that in the past,
this could bring some traffic from some engines, most notably
AltaVista. What about Keyword Repetition? Another common abuse
of Meta keyword tags was -- and still is -- the repetition of
words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough
times in this meta tag, the search engines would "think" they
were relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for
those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will
now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word
twice in a row in this tag, even if you're using different
variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can
use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word
more than three or four times within the tag, even if you're
using different variations of it. That's about all there is to
it! If everyone treated these Meta tags with the type of respect
they deserve and only put relevant keywords into it, perhaps we
could get it out of its foster home and back to its rightful
place in the family of Meta tags! software development company
India