SEO Step By Step Guide–21. Meta Keywords

Today web masters are of the general opinion that adding keywords in the meta tags do not matter anymore because Google does not take into consideration these tags for ranking websites. At one time, people were falling head over heels for the meta tags including meta keywords. However, there are no indications that adding meta keywords will have any negative effect on the web page.

Meta keywords were originally intended to offer search engines with additional information regarding your website. These were supposed to tell the search engines what you think are the most important keywords for your website for which it should be listed. Now, search engines overlook this data because of the stuffing of keywords in this section, which does not help search engines provide quality information on the search that was made.

However, when you do want to add meta keywords, you must follow certain guidelines that will help you get the most out of it. First of all you must only add keywords that are already found in your web page’s content. Adding keywords that are not relevant to the page’s content cannot have any positive effect.

The next important point to remember is that not to stuff a long list of keywords here. When meta keywords used to matter, we could see websites with over 50 keywords in the meta keywords. Most of those keywords would not even appear in the page’s content. When you are adding keywords to the meta tags keep to a maximum of 5 to 6 keywords so that it does not dilute the effect of the most important keywords. 

When you are using meta keywords, do not repeat the keywords too often for example in the following list – web design India, cheap web design, affordable web design, web design work, the keywords, “web design” is repeated too often and this can indeed harm your webpage’s ranking as the keywords are stuffed here. So make sure when you want to bring in variations on the same keywords, try to limit the number of times you will use it in the meta keywords.

Rather than completely ignoring the meta keywords, adding the meta keywords may help us with search engines that still consider them. Since it is not going to hurt us in any way, we must make sure that we are on the safer side even when we are making a mistake. However, it does not mean that all the meta tags are not important. Meta title tags and the meta description tags are still important and they have their own uses.

Besides the search engine spiders there are other directory bots that visit our websites to list our site in our directories. In such cases, having proper meta keywords will be highly beneficial. So do pay attention to your meta keywords it will certainly pay you by the end of the day.

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