What is Meta Information? Meta information is found in the <head> section of every website and includes information that doesn't appear on the actual web page. There are plenty of different types of meta information that can be used. Some of the metadata includes things such as directions for the search engines on which pages to spider, authoring information and web page descriptions. There are three pieces of meta data, however, that are typically known by the general website owner:
Title Tag: The most important for SEO purposes
The Meta Description Tag: Important for SEO and often used as the page description on the SERP
The Meta Keywords Tag: The topic of this article and highly insignificant in the search engine algorithms.
What is the Keyword Meta Tag?
The Keyword Meta Tag is a piece of Meta Data that is used by website owners to tell the search engines what the web page is about. Rather than describing the site in a paragraph format, the tag consists strictly of keywords. This is the basic format of the Keyword Meta Tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">
The comma between keywords is sometimes omitted.
Keyword Meta Tag History
Back in 1995, in the early days of the internet, when the first search engines appeared, the Keyword Meta Tag was THE tag. The major engines of the time, including AltaVista and InfoSeek, ranked webpages within their SERP almost strictly by the information provided by website owners within the Keyword Meta Tag.
This worked well for a while until spammers, specifically porn sites, realized that they could stuff their phrases within the Keyword Tag and they would rank well. They also realized that not only could they put their phrases into the tag, but they could stuff other non-related, popular phrases. I still remember quite clearly searching on AltaVista for almost anything and the first few pages of results were unrelated porn sites.
In about 1998, most of the search engines, led by Google, stopped including the Keyword tag in their algorithms due to the spam potential. They realized that the tag was becoming the main vehicle to spam and they started using the actual content of the sites as the driving force in their SERP.
The Keyword Meta Tag Today
Today, most search engines ignore the Keyword Meta Tag. One of the top mistakes of new website owners trying to SEO on their own sites is the overuse of this tag.
There may be a few smaller meta-crawlers that do support it, however, it is very rare. Those that do support it do not tend to put alot of weight into it. Rather, it is used in conjunction with the content on your website. The engines may, and I say may... just possibly... use the tag to reinforce the information on your site.
It is good practice, that if you are going to include the Keyword Meta Tag within your meta data that you don't include phrases that are not within the content of the web page. If the phrase isn't on the page, putting it in the meta tag won't help you get ranked well.
Personally, I think that there may... and again... only a may.... maybe... just possibly there is are some exceptions. If there are some major synonyms or mispellings of popular phrases that are already found on your site, there may be a benefit to include them within your Meta Keyword Tag.
Another exception MAY be in situations such as this example. You have a website that is dedicated to baseball card collecting, where your main focus throughout the site is 'collect baseball cards'. You have a page about a specific category of cards, such as the '1976 Topps Series'. If you don't have the word 'collecting' on that page, include it in the Meta Tag. You would, however, get more benefit by actually including the word 'collecting' into the content of the page.
There are many times that SEO Specialists won't even concern themselves with the tag. The time spent creating it for the small possibility of it being used to help increase rankings isn't typically worth the time to implement it.
