Many of us know that the meta keyword tag is obsolete nowadays, right? But the Veracity is that we still see site owners using meta keywords on their website. Moreover to that, people are still searching for meta keywords according to Google Trends.
What are Meta Keywords?
Meta keywords are one of the types of meta tag that appear in the HTML code of a Web page and help tell search engines what the topic of the page is.
Meta keywords are eminent from regular keywords because they appear in the source code of your page rather than on the visible page itself.
It looks something like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="seo, search engine
optimization, search engine optimization,
search engine ranking">
Meta Keywords is concealed from public but visible to Many search engines. The keywords which you incorporate in content attribute would be used as ranking factor by the search engines.
The End of the Meta Keyword.
Ten years back, meta keywords were used to define keywords of an HTML page or website At that time, it was one of the major facet used by Google and other major search engines in ranking websites or pages in search engine result page
As a consequence webmasters and SEO expert started to misuse it by stuffing web pages with keywords even when the keywords weren’t related to the page.
Due to this Misuse, Google and other search engines decided to remove keywords in their meta tags from their ranking algorithm.
Do Yahoo! and Bing Use Meta Keywords?
In October 2009, at SMX East, Yahoo! announced that they no longer use the meta keywords tag anymore either. This turned out to be not completely true, as they do index them, but they won’t even help you one bit.
Bing also stated in 2014:
“Today, it’s pretty clear the meta keyword tag is dead in terms of SEO value.
Earlier, they even Suggested that using meta keywords tag in the wrong way could work against you because it’s rather seen as a Spam signal than a ranking signal.
Here’s the Bottom Line on Meta Keywords
So don’t squander your time on the meta keywords tag. Instead of thinking which keywords to use in that tag and wasting your precious time, think about your content for 5 minutes longer. Really. It’s worth it. Or spend your time doing actual keyword research, because while the meta keywords tag is obsolete, keywords are still very much alive.