In this three part series I will describe the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is what is usually included in a website design that claims to be “Search Engine Friendly”. Many website designers will use this term to give the impression that their websites will be indexed and ranked highly by search engines and may not even need SEO in order to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. While these “Search Engine Friendly” websites may indeed be indexed by search engines, they most likely will not rank highly as there are many other factors involved in order to increase search engine ranking. Were this a group of articles on Advanced SEO, this may in fact be a 150 part series which would change every month as search engines update their algorithms.

Nonetheless these three steps are indeed important to SEO, even though they have been used and abused in the past. In today’s post I will focus on the third part of the three parts listed below, the META Keywords Tag. Please note that the three “Tags” discussed below appear within the coding of the website, specifically in the head section.

1. Title Tag
2. META Description Tag
3. META Keyword Tag

The META Keywords Tag is a lot less relevant than what it used to be in the past. This is due to abuse of the tag in terms of keyword spamming where hundreds of keywords were inserted into this field to trick search engines into thinking that these keywords, often irrelevant to the website, were in fact important.

The META Keywords Tag used to be primarily used so that a search engine could come along, read the keywords  and keyword phrases that were inserted into this tag and index the website page in accordance with the keywords that appeared within this tag.

As mentioned, due to spamming techniques used to rank websites highly by abusing this tag, the META Keywords Tag is quite irrelevant in the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo. 

Should you still decide to use this tag, especially for the benefit of smaller search engines which may still take notice of it, you should be careful to only insert keywords and keyword phrases which actually appear withing the visible content area of your website page.

Should you include keywords or keyword phrases which do not appear within the content of your site, the larger search engines such as Google and Yahoo may actually penalise you for attempting to trick them into ranking your website highly for a term that does not exist on your page. This is the reason why many people no longer include the META Keywords Tag in their code, in order to avoid a possible penalty. But when used correctly, one can still benefit from increased visibility in minor and perhaps even more relevant (to your industry) search engines .