Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Dec 30, 2009
A few weeks ago I raised a question on the importance of keywords. I am aware that Google came out in September saying that they do not look at Meta keywords in terms of web search ranking.
There was so much response here is an update on the views coming back.
Christopher Regan had a very valid point "Some kind words of advice, group: pretend you're back in graduate school, need to get you degree in record time, then become fluent in all things involving RDF. So, bag the very old world of META keywords."
He als shared this view "Don't bother with keywords. As to your competitors knowing what you are targeting they can use SpyFu.com and easily check on your PPC buys, then also use other tools for keyword/phrase density scans."
Bryan Philips also came back with "The sites would perform almost equally poorly with no optimization at all. However, the site with the meta tags will get a better click through rate on the SERPs, granted you wrote a decent, relevant meta description."
The other view of course is
"Meta keywords are outdated. Not necessary.........."
Matt managed to summarize the general view perfectly "The major search engines (i.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) do not look at meta keywords any more. In terms of meta-data usage, I would suggest putting some effort into your meta-descriptions, as these show in search engine results.
If you are concerned about on-page SEO, make sure to use the key words in the page title, H1 tags, content, and alt-text.
In reality, 75% of SEO comes from inbound links. Focus your attention on a link building strategy (I suggest blogging), and you'll see better results."
There were also helpful links posted, so check them out for further information:
http://mychristinemarie.com/archives/meta-tags-neccessary
http://searchengineland.com/sorry-yahoo-you-do-index-the-meta-keywords-tag-27743
http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2009/12/01/debunking-common-seo-myths.aspx
http://marketingeasy.net/keywords-meta-tags-and-seo-dont-use-it/2009-10-02/
http://bit.ly/4WVvfM
So what are your views?
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Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Dec 16, 2009
So Google came out in September saying that they do not look at Meta keywords in terms of web search ranking.
4 months on, what is the feeling about Meta keywords. Should we put them in or leave them out? My own personal view is to leave them in from the experience that I have seen it still they still have some relevance. Even if it is to clarify what your website page is about.
So I did a quick search for the term "Insurance" and the first 3 sites all have keywords. I did the same test for a few more words such as "Hotel", "Loan" and a less popular word of "broadband". All sites in the top 3 listings had keywords with reference to the search term. Is this proof that keywords matter, no not really. But is it worth the risk?
So I asked the population in Linkedin what their view was on using keywords for SEO and Inbound Marketing. Here are some of the responses.
"You should definitely keep your meta data up-to-date. While the engines might not weigh them as heavily as they once did, they still help your visitors to your page. For example, your description tag is what visitors see in the SERPs and a well-written one can often make the difference between someone ignoring you, or becoming a potential customer."
"No influence on Google (there are few minor search engines which specialize in different areas that still have that as a certain weight, but it is in 99% of the cases not worth the effort to optimize for those), whereas its good for tracking what KW you want to have the specific page optimized for. On the other hand if you do it that way you send the same message to competition. So one use scenario I can imagine are huge Intranets where it helps the admin to track keyword optimization success ratio."
"They can be useful for internal web searches and for intranet searches (Although many companies are using Google for this now). But there is now harm including them unless they contradict the content on the webpage in question.
A concise meta description that compliments your content is a must."
In summary they do no harm, but are very useful in describing what your webpage is about. So our advice is to keep the keywords to under 10 and do not feel pressured to use all 10. Remember the goal is to describe the webpage is 10 words or less.
So, what is tyour view on Meta Keywords. Yes or No?
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