The Real Truth About Keywords

The ‘meta keywords’ tag still causes a lot of confusion with people who believe that whatever keywords you put into it, it will make a difference to rankings. Here lies the problem. In the past when the meta keywords tag still played a part in search engine optimisation, people did put whatever they wanted into it to try to boost rankings and traffic, e.g ‘britney spears’ any other celebrity you could think of plus other more unmentionable keywords!

So with all this spamming going on, it’s no surprise the search engines decided not to bother using it as part of the way they rank sites. But there is still a wide belief it is used by the search engines in the way they rank sites.

Well, the answer to this came last week from Matt Cutts, a Google Software Engineer (Head of their Web Spam team), so effectively, straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re still confused about the meta keywords tag, then take a couple of minutes to read this post and watch the video which should clear up any questions you have.

By the way, if you’re not sure what the meta keyword tag is, it’s a tag that sits in the code of your web page that visitors to your site can’t see, but the search engines can read. It’s a place where you can list the keywords that relate to your website and looks something like this: