Death of the Meta Tag Keywords

What Exactly Are Meta Keywords?

Keyword meta tags you could use in the HTML code of your site. In theory, you would use this tag to provide the search engines with more information regarding what your page is about. The search engines would then read the keywords in the tag and if the keyword is not in a target or header tahe it would think your spamming the search engine.

 Keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.

 Google took action first. In 2009, the search engine officially announced that it does not use the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor. 

 Google has just removed another feature from the Google Search Console: the content keywords report, one of the earliest features found in the Google Search Console when it was first built

 So the real answer is Google and I believe Bing are now rank sites based on context rather that just a list of words and phrases.

 As to using it there is no negative effect for Google. The reason most do not use it is that since Google does not, why would you put the keywords in and make it easy for your competitors to know what you are targeting?

Are you still Using Keywords?


 If you really want to use the meta keywords tag, then consider only useng them sparingly. That means you need to be sure you only place the few most relevant keywords within the tag. 

So What Meta tags are there to use?


 Remember there are a lot of meta tags that are still used & you must use them properly.
Here a list I can remember:


  • html tag title
  • meta name description
  • meta name robots
  • meta name revisit-after
  • meta name abstract
  • meta name author
  • meta name contact
  • meta name copyright
  • meta name distribution
  • meta name expires
  • meta name generator
  • meta name googlebot
  • meta name language
  • meta name news keywords
  • meta name no email
  • meta name rating
  • meta name reply-to
  • meta name slurp
  • meta name webauthor
     
  • meta equiv cache-control
  • meta equiv content-type
  • meta equiv cookie
  • meta equiv disposition
  • meta equiv imagetoolbar
  • meta equiv ms theme
  • meta equiv pics-label
  • meta equiv pragma
  • meta equiv refresh
  • meta equiv resource type
  • meta equiv script-type
  • meta equiv style-type
  • meta equiv window-target
  • meta data Dublin Core
  • Meta tag Rel="nofollow"
  • Meta tag Rel="canonical"
  • Miscellaneous Meta Tags
  • Miscellaneous http-equiv

How do I know what meta tags to use?

I would suggest you use a meta tag generator till you find the list of meta tags you want to use.  You should also look at a generator for your twitter card & Open Graph protocol.  If you search Google you can find a lot of  meta tag generators

There are even generators from Facebook & Twitter.

So the Answer is meta tags  are Good, but keyword meta tags are dead.




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