Google publicly responds to the age old question about keywords in meta tags. There has been speculation that they do not use the tags as much as they used to being that people have spent so much of the past easily spamming the system. Some of the blogs that I read and people I have talked to have said they believe that keyword meta tags have no relevance anymore. I personally have not been including meta tags in any of the websites I have created for the past 6 months now. Even with All In One SEO Pack installed on this WordPress blog I have yet to fill out keyword meta tags specifically for any of my blog posts. I am still able to obtain front page and #1 organic rankings. Now my suspicions have been confirmed that they do not use them at all. So what does this mean for websites and seo? See my thoughts below the video.
Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
What does this mean for my website today?
This means that it is much more important that the content of your website be on topic and keyword rich. Keywords don’t need to be used in your meta tags, but they need to be used in your content, title and header tags. Meta Tags are invisible to the eye when looking at a website which is why they were used to try to spoof search engines for so many years. Content, titles and header tags can be seen by the eye and this is why Google is using the data found in those items to rank websites instead. Nobody is going to talk about something that has nothing to do with their business or purpose on their website.
Q: Should you use keyword meta tags just in case?
A: It sure doesn’t hurt, I would not waste your time. If any of my websites or clients websites have keyword meta tags it is because they were added quite some time ago and they are not hurting anything by staying there.
What does this mean for other search engines?
I believe that most of the other major search engines are ranking sites in a similar way to Google. They understand that reading keyword meta tags is web 1.0 (pardon the cliche).
What should I do to get better ranking?
Take a good look at your websites content and make sure it is easy to read, well organized and rich with keywords that would be used to describe your product or service.
I don’t know how well my website performs, what can I do?
You can head over to webdesign.jeradhill and order a free website audit.
http://webdesign.jeradhill.com/siteaudit
Very fascinating…I enjoy reading your article. Thanks for the convincing information.