KEYWORD meta tag is not out of the picture just yet (but it's close.)

If you have been interested in search engine optimization (SEO) at all, you are probably aware that Google has stopped using the KEYWORD meta tag to rank web pages in it's search engine index. This means that adding the KEYWORD meta tag to your website pages no longer has any bearing on how Google will index your web page.

In October this year,  Yahoo also reported that it no longer uses the KEYWORD meta tag, but they misspoke. It turns out that Yahoo still uses the KEYWORD meta tag, but is has been reduced to the least important factor in their ranking algorithm. In a response from Yahoo, the following was offered as explanation:

Words that appear in any other part of documents, including the body, title, description, anchor text etc., will take priority in ranking the document – the re-occurrence of these words in the meta keyword tag will not help in boosting the signal for these words. Therefore, keyword stuffing in the keyword tag will not help a page’s recall or ranking, it will actually have less effect than introducing those same words in the body of the document, or any other section.

However, when no other ranking signal is present, unique words that only appear in the meta keyword tag section of documents can still be used to recall these documents.

SO... Google doesn't use the keywords meta tag, Yahoo uses it, but at a very low priority and Bing hasn't publicly stated if they do or not, but the impression is that they do not.  According to Search Engine Watch as of August 2009, Google handles about 64% of all searches on the internet, Yahoo handles about 16% and Bing handles almost 11%. These three search engines represent 91% of internet searches and they don't care about the KEYWORDS meta tag.

So if we're no longer using the KEYWORDS meta tag, then what do we do with our keywords? The quote from Yahoo sums it up pretty well. When creating or updating web pages the best practice is to place keywords  in the body, title, description, anchor text and alt text of images on your web page.

BTW - I asked Google if keeping an existing keywords meta tag will harm my web page's ranking in any way.  When I get an answer, I'll post it here.

Posted by Webmaster at 11/12/2009 9:19 AM
Categories: SEO, meta tags, search engine optimization
Tags: meta tags SEO search engine optimization
 

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