Meta keywords: Do they matter?
May 27th, 2008I’ve read some articles recently that claim that including meta keywords on your web page may be a futile effort since most search engines are ignoring them these days. The argument is that meta keywords are too easy to game and therefore search engines have stopped paying attention (though most SEOs will tell you to leave them in since they can’t hurt).
According to our tests, however, the meta keyword tag is just as important as ever. We created two test web pages: one with our target keyword placed in the meta keyword tag, the other without any meta keyword tags (though both pages contained the same # of keywords within the page text). The result? Our meta keyword page is ranked above the page without in Google and the meta keyword page is the only page that was indexed by Yahoo. So it seems the major search engines do still care about your meta keywords - so don’t leave them out!
