Comments on: Ditch your meta keywords

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:36:57 +0000

Nice article, found it by chance after a friend of a customer complained that I left out meta keywords from his website.

As has been mentioned some of the search engines don’t give meta keyword the importance they once did because of spamming by webmasters.

I have not, for a while used meta keywords in any of the websites I have developed over the last year or so and have not noticed any downturn in results. I like to add unique meta description tags as well as page title and heading tags with keyword rich text. This seems to get me the best results.

I do how ever use a meta tag to for Wordpress that adds a meta description based on the first paragraph of your post and adds your blog’s categories as keywords for the “keywords” meta tag. This seems to be working also.

By: Johann

Johann — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:35:44 +0000

About time I found your blog because I just threw away meta keywords on my site, too.

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 01:52:43 +0000

I think meta words are important but not as important as they used to be (when people put bogas words in). I agree that its important to use them as it can increase your SEO

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:44:46 +0000

I’m not sure I agree entirely.
I’m no SEO expert but I’ve found in my endeavor to get our site ranking highly on Google for the phrase “web design Melbourne”, keywords have played a significant roll. In a competitive field like web design, I think Google considers every aspect. In less competitive markets, I would agree that keywords aren’t worth squat. We also use a global include for keywords too.

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:12:36 +0000

Interesting point about Yahoo being more popular in USA than Australia.

SOT – In several movies (National Treasure for one), when they do searches I remembered being surprised that they were all using yahoo instead, so maybe your right about yahoo being more popular in other countries like USA.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 05:09:04 +0000

thanks for those stats but on my stats that I receive I rarely get yahoo, whether thats my bad coding or they are just not searching for me

Yeah I dunno – maybe a regional variation? We’re both based in Australia which might make a difference. I checked one of my client’s Australian based sites, and the referring search engine stats were skewed massively in Google’s favour. Google combine with Google images accounted for 90% of search engine referrals, MSN 4.5% and Yahoo a paltry 1.8%.

On the other hand, most of the research I’ve done indicates that Google’s market share is much lower in the US, ranging from 45% – 70% depending who you ask.

If anyone has SE referral stats for a site whose audience if predominantly from the US, I’d be curious to hear if there is a significant variation from the referral traffic Jermayn and myself are seeing?

By: Jermayn Parker

Jermayn Parker — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 04:32:12 +0000

I have just started using a meta data tool that allows me to use separate keywords and meta data for WordPress (read more hear)

@Jonathan, thanks for those stats but on my stats that I receive I rarely get yahoo, whether thats my bad coding or they are just not searching for me

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 03:22:55 +0000

@Zach Katkin: It would be nice to have proof one way or the other whether there is truth to the speculation that Google penalizes sites with keywords that don’t appear to match the on-page content. But even without proof, I don’t see any value in doing a global meta keyword include for every page on the site. It certainly won’t help your search engine ranking to have identical keywords for every page on the site, so why not just leave them out altogether and save a little energy?

By: Zach Katkin

Zach Katkin — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:34:11 +0000

Personally Google drives all of my traffic. I rarely see Yahoo or MSN in my stats. Personally I doubt Google or any other search engines will ever de-value, or rank a site lower because of its meta keyword info. Many web designers are guilty of doing a global include for the meta keywords tags, because it is very time consuming to include exact, page appropriate keyterms for each page.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 20:54:56 +0000

@Aaron: I would like to think Google is smart enough to notice when keywords are bunched together in high concentration, such as in a paragraph at the bottom of a page. I’m not an SEO expert, but my understanding is that Google pays attention to the placement of text of the page, and that weight is assigned to keywords that appear near the top of the page, and also in the last paragraph (ie: the introduction and summary of a document). Also, text that appears in title and heading tags are assigned greater importance. Keyword density is also significant, and if the trophy keywords/phrases appear too many times on a page Google will assume you are trying to cheat the system.