How Meta Keyword Tags went out of prominence in SEO Strategy

February 13, 2018

Keywords are at the core of your entire SEO campaign, they decided the success or failure of a company’s SEO efforts. An SEO expert will chalk out an effective SEO strategy based on the selected keywords as each one of them has its own unique search volume. The website is optimized based on these selected keywords. Meta keywords are another important element for SEO. First of all it is important to understand about it in details. Meta Tags contain ‘Title’ – It is the heading of the page on the website that shows up in search engine listing. Then there is meta description which is HTML attributes that briefly explain the contents of the landing pages. And then there are meta keywords that are included as focus keywords on the backend of a particular webpage. Meta keywords help in giving the useful and relevant information about the web page to the search engines.

There was a time when Meta keyword tags were very important to get SEO rankings, but not anymore. In 2009 Google changed its policies and announced that it will not consider meta keyword tags in their algorithm as factor for ranking. This was done to counter the phenomenon of keyword stuffing that had plagued online searches since 1995. At that time Alta Vista was one of the major search engine which used to read keyword tag to read the website and relay to search engines that the website has used content that is related to the tags on its pages. Some SEO professionals began using this to protocol to their advantage by dumping keywords to increase the targeted keyword density and improve the chances of get ranked in searches for the particular keyword. Some search engines also started penalizing websites that used to do indulge in keyword stuffing.

Even Yahoo and Bing began ignoring mega keywords tag as a factor in ranking a website. They give very low priority to mega keyword tags. Instead both search engines began giving more preference to other words that would appear in other parts of the webpage i.e… title, description, body text, anchor text etc…

Although there are certain search engines which still use old algorithms for their search mechanics and keyword stuffing could help in getting boosted organic rankings, but it is highly recommended that one should avoid keyword stuffing.