Just How Useless Is The Meta Keywords Tag?

Depending on who you ask, you’ll probably receive several reasons why the Meta keywords tag is of almost no value to your website (with a few minor exceptions). However, as much as the experts bash the lack of importance of the meta keywords tag - you’ll often hear them say something along the lines of, “But just in case, we put it in a clients site anyway”.

That’s huge, because even though the general school of thought across the SEO industry is that Meta keywords simply don’t matter anymore (besides the occasional remote search engine), there are reasons that you should consider including it in your website. I think Russ Jones summed it up best when he said:

“…but two pages with gibberish for content, one with a real keyword in a meta keywords tag, the other without… The one with the keyword will rank above. Which weigh’s more, an anvil, or an anvil with a feather?”

I love that comparison, and it’s exactly the reason why I still recommend to clients/friends that they go ahead and slap a Meta keywords tag in there just in case it comes down to a neck and neck situation in the rankings and you’re looking for every possible advantage you can use (even if it’s exceptionally insignificant).

Another interesting view on the use of keywords in the Meta keywords tag is something that Elisabeth Osmeloski mentioned during a “survey of the experts” at SEOMoz:

“I do believe it is spot-checked for matching up with a page’s content or other SEO elements”

I think that’s a very interesting observation, and who knows, it just may have some truth to it!

Including Meta keywords in the Meta keywords tag was often a way (back in the late 90’s) to influence your ranking for pretty much anything you wanted. Webmasters realized that if they stuff in things like Buy Viagra, Cheap Viagra, and similar spammy words - that it would help rank their spam pages. Of course, I don’t believe this lasted very long, as the search engines wised up to it pretty swiftly for the most part.

That’s why the weighting isn’t worth much (if anything), because it’s just too easy to manipulate. Again, I think the main reasons most webmasters still include it, is because in the construction of a well organized site, it’s kind of “expected” to be there. Like I said before, why not include it? It’s just another way to ‘possibly’ help you out, and it certainly doesn’t hurt anything. Just make sure that you use actual relevent keywords, and not spamwords - because then you may risk getting flagged.

Bottom line - Use the Meta keywords tag properly. It’s considered good practice, and definitely can’t harm you.