SEO By The Page – 5. Meta Keywords Tag

The meta keywords tag was popularized by major search engines such as Infoseek and Alta Vista around 1995, and the popularity of this tag grew quickly until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. By late 1997, however, search engine providers recognized that the information stored in meta elements of any kind, and especially the meta keyword tag, was at best most often unreliable and misleading, and at worst used to draw web users into spam sites. Any unscrupulous webmaster could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to gain false placement in search engines and draw people to their site.

Many search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by meta tags as early as 1998 and, by the early 2000s, most search engines had stopped using meta tag data completely. In July 2002, Alta Vista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.

There is currently no consensus whether or not the meta keywords tag has any effect on indexing and page position with any of the major search engines. It is speculated that it may if the keywords used in the meta tag can also be found in the page content itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven of the top leaders in the search engine optimization profession concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the content attribute of the meta keywords tag ranges from little to none. However, the same article also suggests that Yahoo still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings. Yahoo itself claims support for the keyword meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings.

Since use of the meta keyword tag cannot hurt your indexing it is probably a good idea to include it. The key is to use accurate content the truly reflects that nature and content of your page and, probably, to include all the keywords in the tag in the content of your page.

The meta keyword tag looks like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3,keyword4" />

Some SEO experts say that there should be no spaces between the keywords, just commas. Others say spaces are okay. An early (1995?) Internet draft specification memo states, in part, the following:

"The spaces between a comma and a word or vice versa are ignored..."

suggesting that spaces are acceptable. So the above example could also look like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4" />

But which way really is right? That's actually an unknown but the version without the spaces may be best since it does work (both probably do) but it gives you more useful characters if you don't use the spaces. Search engines typically read a number of characters worth of keywords. No one is really sure of the exact number, and estimates abound, but it is likely, whatever the number, that the spaces would first be counted in the number of characters read and then discarded giving you, effectively, less bang for your proverbial buck.