Can Meta tags such as the keyword tag bring high rankings to my site?

If you had to give up one meta tag, the meta keyword tag would be the one to give up.

Now that we've covered the all-important title tag and meta description tag, it's time to move on to the very misunderstood and abused meta tag, the meta keyword tag.

Everyone knows that to obtain high search engine rankings all you have to do is put the keywords that you want to rank high with into your meta tags, right? Not even close! If it were that simple, I'd certainly be out of work. How many of you reading this column have obsessed over meta tags such as the keyword tag? How many of you have tried putting every relevant keyword you could think of into this meta tag, only to have your site continue to be nearly invisible in the search engines? How many of you couldn't decide if you should put commas between the keywords? Spaces? No commas? ALL CAPS? Plurals?

What Does This Meta Tag Look Like?

This meta tag is usually placed beneath the title and meta description tags in the <HEAD></HEAD> section of your pages' HTML code, like this:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>your DESCRIPTIVE KEYWORDS title goes here</TITLE>
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Your keyword rich marketing sales-pitch meta description goes here">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space">
</HEAD>

If this meta tag were a child, it would be put into a foster home due to all the abuse it has received over the years! Once upon a time, in the prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), meta keyword tags were a great little tool for the search engines to use to help them determine how to rank sites in their search results. When the engines' databases were small, this meta tag was a quick, easy method to help decide which keywords might be important on a site.

However, as always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don't quite understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors But apparently the goal was to bring in traffic, period.

Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of your Web pages.

Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags?

Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients' Web sites, but don't bother with them on my own sites.

What Should I Put in these Meta Tags?

First let's recap what needs to be done before you attempt to create meta keyword tags (ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever created):

Choose your relevant keywords.
Write the site's content based on these keywords.
Create a title tag using the same keywords.
Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also based on these keywords.

Once you do the above things properly, putting together your meta keyword tag is a very simple procedure.

I usually begin putting the keywords I used in the title of my page in the meta keyword tag. The first words in any tag are assumed to be given more weight, so these are most important. Then I go through each paragraph of text on the page and take any important phrases that might be used in the copy and paste them into the meta keyword tag. I usually separate the phrases with a comma and no space. This is simply a personal preference. Using no commas at all in this tag is basically the same thing, since most engines appear to treat commas as a space. After I get every important word or phrase from the text on the page, I add some common misspellings of some of these same words. I know for a fact that in the past, this could bring some traffic from some engines, most notably AltaVista.
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