Google recently posted advice on it’s Google Webmaster blog advice that the Meta Keyword tag in Html pages does not count towards ranking. This is not really news to anyone who follows trends in SEO and does research into what works well and what doesn’t, but it’s an interesting move by Google.
A Short History of the Meta Keyword Tag
If you’re the sort who gets confused with your metas, tags, links and scripts, the Meta Keyword is a particular Html tag that is embedded in the page, but not visible to the end user. You can see this if you view the source of a web page - the syntax is as follows:
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="iFinity Blog" />
You can also see this information in FireFox under the Tools->Page Info menu item.
This is contained in the Html <head> section of a standard web page. The tag is as old as Html itself, and reached it’s zenith in the mid 1990’s with the early search engines using this value to determine rank for pages. That was back when people were relatively honest about what was on their page. It was also back in the days where you didn’t get spam emails in your inbox, either. It didn’t take long for people to work out that you could ‘stuff’ your Meta Keywords tag and rank your page for all sorts of things.
With the arrival of Google in the late 90’s, search engines began their current migration away from on-page factors like meta keywords and towards off-page factors such as external links. This was because search engines became virtually useless relying on factors that could be easily manipulated, as search result quality depended on how badly a webmaster wanted to be at the top of a page, rather than what was the best result for a given query. You could argue will still aren’t there yet, but for someone who has been submitting search queries for over 15 years, the improvements are immense.
So what does it mean?
You might be wondering ‘how does this affect me?’. The answer is : it doesn’t. This is just an official announcement of what has been widely known for years. The keywords Meta Tag doesn’t influence your ranking at all. You could probably even stuff your keywords meta tag with known spammy terms and it shouldn’t make any difference. I wouldn’t recommend doing that, though.
About the most important thing this announcement does is to stop any arguments and discussions speculating whether the keywords tag does affect your ranking in Google.
So I should delete my keywords Meta Tag, right?
In a short answer, no. For a second, Google have stated they have no effect on ranking. So you can still put them in if you want. There’s a couple of reasons behind my thinking:
1) You don’t know what search technologies are coming down the line. Leave in your keywords in case they become important again (although I concede this is unlikely).
2) Only Google has made this announcement. We don’t know about Yahoo, Bing et al. They may still use them to sort out ranking for obscure terms or long-tail type searches. Besides, taking the time to think about the correct keywords in a page helps you to concentrate on the in-page factors for the page (headers, images, bold keywords etc). It takes 10 seconds to put them in, so what’s the harm. Just don’t keyword stuff and expect it to help you.
However, if you’ve got the one-eyed Google love going and hate the Keyword Meta Tag, by all means expunge them from your site. It’s not going to matter much either way.
What about the Meta Description?
The other common ‘Meta’ tag is the Description. This is a short description of the contents of the page. As the Google webmaster post says
“For example, we do sometimes use the "description" meta tag as the text for our search results snippets.
Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.”
So you absolutely do want to include a short, useful description in your Meta Description field. Try and keep it to about 150 characters, and Google may pick this up in it’s entirety and use it as the description for their search result on the page. Even better, they highlight the matching keywords in bold. You need to take the time to create this entry carefully. This should be crafted as carefully as the two lines of text that appear in a Google Adwords advertisement. You need to get the maximum clickthrough from the results page to your website, or all your ranking efforts will be for nothing.
Actions to take today
If you have spammy keyword tags, you may as well clean them up to be short and succinct. Aim for just a handful of words to summarise the page.
If you don’t have any tags, don’t worry.
If you do have a couple of short tags, don’t worry.
If you’ve got a content module that generates these tags for you automatically, don’t worry.
In other words : don’t really worry about it. But do take the time to review your Meta Description tags to make sure they are nice, short and snappy, and aren’t keyword spammed. Because that just looks, well, so 1995.