Then End of the Meta Keyword Tag

The End of the Meta Keyword Tag
March 24, 2009

SEO experts are now saying that using the meta keyword tag is a waste of time because Google and Yahoo don't even read it anymore. I haven't even attempted to verify this with my own sites because I don't wish for them to drop off the face of the earth by doing too much tinkering.

I do suppose those experts are probably correct, and can see the benefits of no longer reading the meta keyword tag. Supposedly, the search engine bot reads the text on the page and finds all it needs there without having to read what the webmaster wants it to use as keywords.

This makes sense in many ways, but it still doesn't change the fact that those keywords need to be present in the text itself. For some reason, I just don't trust a piece of software to figure out what I want to convey. At least with the meta tags you could specifiy what you wanted to spider to look for in the text.

Natural and organic doesn't just apply to fruits and vegetable anymore. It's the way the search engines want text to read, rather than contrived and manipulated to suit the webmaster's purpose. So now, not only should you drop the keyword meta tag, you should be very careful how you construct your text so that it doesn't appear that you're doing keyword stuffing.

Now, having said all this, I suppose there are more obscure search engines that still read the meta keywords, so leaving them in certainly won't hurt anything. But if you're creating a new web page, I wouldn't even bother with them.