Should you use Meta Keywords?

To Use Meta Keywords or Not, That is The Question?

The debate on the merit of using “Meta keywords” is still going on in the SEO world, and looking around the web I can see that many comments have been made, however, I have noticed that in may cases some really salient points had been missed.

For the most part most participants agreed that the Meta tag could do no harm, but was also of little use, a pretty good summation, but missing some really vital points.

First, it is very true that this tag is not being used much by the Engines at the moment but the point about it being not dangerous may not be so accurate. There are three points that must be carefully considered when adding Meta keywords to a site’s pages.

1. Under no circumstances should more than 20 be used, my advice being to keep this as low as possible, under 10 being a good target.
2. The same keywords should not be repeated throughout the site, varying these (as well as the title and description tags) is one of the “musts” for serious SEO.
3. The keywords used should be repeated or be relevant to the visible text (the body copy) of the page they are on. If the words can be seen to be irrelevant by the Search Engines to the purpose of the page, they may well consider that you are trying to spam them.

The above issues have led many SEO companies to leave them out entirely recently, something that may have a strange effect in the future. I say this as if enough people do stop using them, it is possible that the Engines may well decide to increase their relevance in the algorithms they use, thus if you are using them correctly, and this happens, you’ve got a head start over those that aren’t. This is itself a good reason to use them (wisely) at the moment.

Meta tags are of course only a tiny part of optimising a site for the Search Engines, but as that famous supermarket says “every little helps”.

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