THE USED AND ABUSED META KEYWORD TAG

By far the most abused of all Meta tags in search engine optimization has been the keyword tag! Back in the early days of the Net when the search engines had nowhere near the size of the databases they do now, this tag was a quick and easy way to achieve indexing. With that said, people started to stuff keywords into this tag, repeating phrases and including phrases that had nothing to do with the page, let alone the site.

Over time, the search engines wizened up to this and changed their indexing algorithms. While many will argue that this tag has become useless, we believe it can't hurt to have it. For those engines that still read the Keyword tag, it may give your site a bit of a boost. If not, you surely didn't loose anything, provided you didn't abuse it.

Where does the Keyword Tag go?

The Meta keyword tag is usually placed beneath the Description tag and looks like this:

<META NAME=”Keywords” CONTENT=”your keywords go here separated by a space”>

Keyword Tag Tips

Before attempting to write keyword tags we suggest doing the following:
1. identify the relevant keywords for that particular page
2. write the content for that page based on the chosen keywords
3. create the title tag using those same keywords
4. write the meta description tag that includes the selected keywords

Finally, write the Keyword tag. You know the phrases you have targeted for that page and if you read through the copy again you can probably find a few more.

Whatever you do, don't repeat the same phrase twice (and that includes plurals and different tenses)! it's okay to use the same keyword in different phrases, but make sure it's no more than three or four times in total, regardless of the number of different variations.

To Use or Not To Use

Due to the overwhelming abuse of the poor old Meta Keyword tag, many engines no longer take it into account and give more weight to the actual content of the page. Can it make or break getting a high page rank? No way. If time is of the essence, this is the tag to skip. If you have the time, we still think it can't hurt - provided it's done right and not abused.