MOSTLY DEAD OR JUST DEAD
Recently a client supplied me with a list of search terms (keywords) to add to their new site. These were the terms the previous site builder had applied to ensure better, more successful searches, driving more and more potential customers to their site. Or so the sales pitch went.
I honestly wasn’t sure exactly how to proceed. I have used a couple different SEO plugins and I couldn’t remember seeing a spot to add this list of “keywords” or “keyword meta tags.”
A quick search lead me to a couple tutorials that explained how to add the keywords easily to the theme I was using. Cool, this will be easy.
But wait, a little more searching and reading lead me down another path. A path where I realized there was no need to dutifully add these search words. Search engines don’t use them.
Now to explain this to my client. And as I began that email I realized I might as well turn this into a little blog post.
HERE WE GO:
The actual code required to add the keywords was pretty straight forward:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc”>
So, as I mentioned actually adding the list of search terms was going to be pretty easy which, in the end, was the problem. To improve your SEO you could simply add whatever you wanted and search engines would just rank you accordingly. Easy Peasy. When the web was a new and wonderous place to share knowledge this presented few problems, but as the web grew and became more commercial companies began to spam this feature stuffing their sites full of keywords in the hope of gaining SEO ranking.
And, of course, unscrupulous companies could simply add their competitions name to their keyword list and magically a search for the competitor’s company would bring up their company in the search results. Not good.
THE OFFICIAL END OF KEYWORDS
At some point search engines began ignoring the keywords meta tag. Not really sure when exactly that started but in September 2009 Google announced, “Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.”
In 2014, Bing (Microsofts search engine) said, “…the meta keywords tag is dead in terms of SEO value.”
At this point one would think the the discussion is over. But it seems, “There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead.”
Fairly recently, in 2022, Google’s John Mueller addressed the issue again, “The answer is still no. We do not use the contents of the keyword meta tag in Google Search.”
DEAD NOW. NOPE.
But another blog post I read said that as much as 30% of companies still use keyword meta tags. I guess, because it’s such a seemingly easy way to increase the SEO of sites, less than honourable SEO marketing companies can continue to market this keyword strategy to unwitting prospective clients.
Or simply old habits (mostly) die hard.
Now I’ve got this figured out, if you need help with your sites SEO please don’t hesitate to contact us, you know, unless you need a bunch of keywords added!
