Can You Ignore Optimizing the Keyword Meta Tag?

Oh, the poor abused Keyword Meta tag!

Bringing up the rear at Number #3 of quasi-debatable importance in our discussion of tags/Meta tags, is the poor Keyword tag.  It’s true.  This Meta tag has been so used and finally abused by SEO spammers of days gone by, that now you WILL NOT gain better search engine ranking help via this Meta tag. Oh well.

Yup … the spammers took real advantage of this tag in the early days of the Internet.  They learned that they could insert keywords — ANY and/or ALL types of keywords — into this tag and wow!  They would get search engine recognition for those words.  And they didn’t even have to use the keywords within the body of their web page’s text.

Unfair??  You bet!  And as always happens, the search engines got smart, and they changed the algorithms and now, well there are many SEO experts that don’t even waste a second on optimizing the Keyword Meta tag.  Not for their own websites or for their clients sites. 

So, What’s an Honest Website Owner to Do?

I’ll tell you what you ought to do from my viewpoint as a professional SEO consultant.  Go ahead and ethically optimize this Meta tag with your primary keyword (or keyword phrase) that you are targeting to the page, and add in three or four other keyword “modifiers”.  That’s it.  Remember that you will not gain any ranking points from the search engines.  Many of the engines don’t even take a second look at this Meta tag anymore.

As an example, for this blog post I could use: “keyword meta tag, search engine optimization, seo”.

So, though many highly regarded SEO gurus may be chuckling as I offer you this suggestion,  I am of the opinion that let’s go ahead and properly optimize the Keyword Meta tag.  Because who knows?  Maybe way up in the future this Meta tag WILL gain back some algorithmic weight and guess what?  You will be ready.  You won’t have to go back over all your web pages, inserting Keyword Meta tag information.

Where Is This Meta Tag Located?

You’ll normally find this Meta tag placed beneath the Title and Description Meta tag in the ‹HEAD› section of your pages’ HTML code:
‹HEAD›
‹TITLE›Your Title is inserted here.‹/TITLE›
‹META NAME=”DESCRIPTION” CONTENT=Your targeted keyword description goes here.›
‹META NAME=”KEYWORDS” CONTENT=Your keywords go here, separated by a comma.›
‹/HEAD›

That’s about it.  Again, I DO recommend you optimize the Keyword Meta tag.  I DON’T believe there is any search engine ranking weight in it at all.  However, with all things in the world of SEO, we just never know when once again, this Meta tag will become important ranking-wise.  Pay attention to it, but don’t fret over it, either.

Do you need help in determining which keywords to target to help you get targeted traffic?  No problem.  It doesn’t cost a cent to give the Free Trial version of Wordtracker a try.   I highly recommend it!