Meta Keywords Update, Are they good for Inbound Marketing
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"Meta keywords are outdated.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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