Meta keywords are given absolutely no value by all major search engines, that’s zilch, zero, nothing, nada. In fact Bing, for example, will penalize you if you’re still keyword stuffing. Having said that meta keywords are still useful for SEO, yes really!
If they do nothing to improve search engine rankings why bother you ask? Great question.
Simply put meta keywords are the notes for the SEO work you do for each page of a given website. When you write content for a page or article you should always have a primary keyword phrase you are trying to rank for. Ideally, you should also have 1-2 secondary keyword phrases you would like to rank for.
Prioritize your keyword phrases from most to least important (never more than three per page) and create a meta keyword tag for them. If you’re using Wix, Drupal or another content management system (as we recommend) you should be able to input your keywords into form fields. No CMS, no problem, use a meta tag generator tool like Submit Express, free and easy to use.
If you still like to type your own html code the meta keyword tag looks like this:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, Search Engine Optimization, keywords”>
Great done! Assuming you are performing link building and taking other appropriate SEO actions this page should start to get some organic traffic. Now go away and come back here in three months.
It’s three months later, do you remember what keywords you were trying to rank for on that page?
Pull up your analytics for that page and look at which organic keywords are bringing in traffic. Now go have a look at your meta keyword tags. What do you see? Are your most important keywords bringing in a lot of traffic? If the answer is yes you’ve done a great job at optimizing that page. If the answer is no you’d better go back for another look.
This is just one example of how having your keywords embedded in page code can help you keep track of your SEO work. Two other great reasons to do this are (a) if you collaborate on SEO work it will make life a lot easier to share and communicate your page level tactics, and (b) many automated tools can scrape the keyword meta tags to provide SEO efficiency reports.
Yes, in a way this was never the intended purpose for keyword meta tags but it sure beats using a spreadsheet.
Need help with implementing this, check out our Search Engine Optimization services.
