People that have just a smidgen of knowledge of search engine optimisation techniques have long debunked the assumption that the META KEYWORDS tag offers any value to search engine rankings.
In the olden days, when the keywords tag was king, this wasn’t the case, but now Google has officially announced that it no longer uses the content of the keywords tag when evaluating how to rank a webpage. No surprise really
Should you bother adding content to the META KEYWORDS tag?
I wouldn’t go out of your way to do so.
There are other factors at play which are much more important than the keywords tag when it comes to search engine optimisation (title tag, meta description, page content, anchor text, filenames and probably even the humble alt tag), however, if you use WordPress and the All in One SEO Pack plugin, you can set it up so your tags become your keywords. I would certainly recommend doing that. I don’t think I would bother manually adding keywords to each post, but I do find that old habits die hard.
Matt Cutts has written a short post on his blog about Google’s announcement.
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Tagged as:
meta keywords,
meta tags,
search developments,
search rankings,
SEO
