Do meta keywords matter?
Posted under: Do meta keywords matter for SEO? According to Google they will not impact your search results at all.
From the Official Google Webmaster Blog:
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Does this mean all meta tags do not matter? No.
Google still uses the meta description tag but not for anything related to page rank.
Now does this mean you should not use the meta keyword tag? No it doesn’t.
There is evidence yahoo still uses the meta keyword tag, but it is the least important factor ranking your site in the search results. Still it won’t hurt to have a few relevant keywords in your meta keywords tag. Bing also uses the meta keyword tag. So if traffic from Bing and Yahoo is important to you then it may still be worth the couple seconds it takes to create the tag. However don’t go over board. Bing recommends focusing on a few keywords relevant to your site and might actually penalize results over a certain character limit.
If you do place meta keywords on your page make sure they are related to your content, are not too long character length wise, and that they are in the head tag of your page. Keep in mind that they mean nothing to Google but may still improve your site rankings slightly in other search engines. Meta descriptions however do count in Google and most other search engines and optimizing this does matter. Of course all of this goes along with putting out interesting content people will read and enjoy. To conclude you should use meta tags for non-Google SEO but it will not impact search results significantly unlike what is likely the most important part of SEO.
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