Hi guys,

I've built my website, without using a keyword's meta tag. It's shown great results, holding a top 5 ranking for my desired keywords for quite a few months. I've recently dropped to 9th, and I'm looking at ways to keep me on that first page.

I've heard the keywords meta tag, has lost its importance. Should I include a keywords meta tag? If i do, will it damage my existing ranking?

I read in another post, that you should only include keywords mentioned through out your page copy. Is this a good strategy? I'm assuming it may not be, as google may perceive your page as having too high a keyword-density, and perhaps be treated as spamming?

Opinions please :)

Jeremy

It's not necessary to use the keywords metatag, but I like to do it to make sure I stay focused, and to remind me what the page is being optimized for. If you are not keyword stuffing, sometimes it's easy to forget some of the secondary phases for a specific page after a while.

It certainly will NOT hurt you - at best, it's ignored. The only time I'm aware of that using a keyword metatag would hurt you is second hand, where someone is spamming anyway, and a competitor looks at the keywords and sees that they are totally stuffed, and then starts looking for other things. It's the "other things" that would get you in trouble, though - the kw meta would just be a big flag saying "warning! Inexperienced spammer here!". :)

So use it all you want, as long as it's for the purpose it was intended, and you'll be fine. But since it barely helps, don't spend too much time worrying about it.

Ian

I read in another post, that you should only include keywords mentioned through out your page copy. Is this a good strategy? Do use them, and include phrases that are relevant to the particular page and that appear on the page. Dumping all the keywords people can think of only dilutes, it's best to use only the more important and relevant ones.

Thanks guys, always good to get some clear guidance :)

Jeremy

Although it is mostly ignored or has little relevance, I still create one and then use it throughout the site. It is also good for placing mis-spellings of words you wish to target. Yahoo and Ask Jeeves/Teoma will pick those up and possibly rank your pages well if there is not much competition for them.

Search for "stupid dipnoid" for example and you will see a couple of pages from one of our sites listed. Look at the keyword meta tag of the about.htm page and you will see the phrase represented there and that we were testing this out back in October.

It is not that difficult to create one so why not do it? I just wouldn't go through the trouble of creating individual ones for each page but rather a master for the whole site.

I often put an individual meta keywords tag on pages even when I don't put a meta description (which I often don't do right away). I put only the keywords that pertain to the individual page, the most important ones. For one thing, it keeps me focused and there *are* some engines using them to some extent.

There are many other reasons to include a legitimate (ie., non-spammy) keywords tag. Some that come to mind are:-

1) There may be other sites/engines that do still use the keyword tag, they can't if you don't include it. Think about all the other smaller SEs,

2) Additional help for directories in determining the correct category or providing keyword info for a Directory listing,

3) Use by SEs when little or no other text material is available on page (IE., graphics heavy pages),

4) and while they may not be using them now, if the SEs do start using the Keyword Tag again, would you rather the angst of hurridly adding them to 1000s of pages, or the calm feeling of knowing that you have included them along the way?

I say continue adding the Keyword Tag, but do it responsibly.

Onya
Woz

We always use it. You never know when it'll come back in style.

I read in another post, that you should only include keywords mentioned through out your page copy. Is this a good strategy?
also maybe for misspellings and similar versions like if you page has sony cs-42 you might add sony cs42 to your keywords tag

Thanks for replies! Advice taken, and a keyword tag has been implemented :)

Jeremy