It has been a debate whether we should use “keywords” meta tag or not.  It really takes someone from Google to stand up and tell you that the meta tag for “keyword” or “keywords” is not taken into consideration in Google’s search ranking.  Thanks KC for showing me this Google video about the official updates from Google on Meta k eywords.  In fact, I got to know more about Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking from Google Webmaster Central blog.

Here’s the video from Google telling us about it

After reading Google’s blog post and their video that they don’t support “keywords” meta tag, I still have some doubts about it.  The reason is that the words are still embedded as part of the whole HTML page, and it will somehow be read by Google to be considered as part of the whole search result algorithm.  I went further and found out from Danny Sullivan’s Search Engine Land that Google has indeed never indexed any of the words inside the “keywords” meta tag!

Discovery about the useless meta tag called “keywords”

In that post, Danny did a small test with his Search Engine Land’s main landing page by putting in the “keywords” meta tag to include the following garbage words “qiskodslajdmnkd, ddakaieciuaj jkdalladpaoaw, wdaopeqndlkakljad”.  He ensured that the search engines have indexed his main landing page by checking their cache.  To his astonishment (or actually it’s my astonishment), Google has never indexed any of the keywords even though it is stored inside the cache!

But wait! The “keywords” meta tag may still be important! Why?

In Danny’s research, he realized that Yahoo and Ask.com have actually indexed the “keywords” meta tag.   For that matter, it is definitely taken into a serious consideration unless you don’t appreciate Yahoo’s traffic.  I checked his article was written on 5 September 2007.  It was kinda old actually, so I check further from Yahoo’s help page.  It states the following:

Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

It states very clearly that they are using “keywords” meta tag.  But again, that article was dated in 30 July 2007.  So far, this is the only article that I can find.

And for Ask.com, there isn’t any help page that suggests about their support for “keywords” meta tag.

Should we still use “keywords” meta tag?

We can see that there is not a very big issue whether we should embrace “keywords” meta tag or not because I tend to see that most of our traffic comes from Google and not Yahoo.  So long as we have optimized our sites properly with the keywords that they deserve, this meta tag is probably just to confirm it for other search engines (not Google).

How about the pages with little or no text?

There are scenarios when the “keywords” meta tag is the only place to check for keywords because there isn’t any visible text at all.

But for those websites which are flash-based, the good news is that Adobe allows SWF flash files to be searchable and there are even books teaching how to optimize your flash for search engines!

As for those who display images only on the front page, you may still use “alternate text” in your images to optimize your pages for search engines. This tag <Title> becomes very important to determine your page.  As for “descriptions” meta tag, it is never really used for search algorithms but they will be useful for displaying in the search results.

How do you optimize your web pages?  Any other tips to share with us?