The meta keyword tag has been the source of debate for some time now in SEO circles. Many have argued that it makes little difference to a site’s ranking, and it seems as though they’ve been proven right.

The search engine optimisation community learned recently that the meta keywords tag is officially off the board for all major search engines. Yahoo!, the last major search engine to take meta keyword tags into consideration, announced that it no longer used the tags in its ranking algorithm.

The company’s senior director of search, Chris Pierry, made the announcement at a search engine discussion session with SEOs in New York. According to Pierry, the search engine stopped taking meta keyword tags into account in the early months of 2009.

A meta keyword tag was a way to provide extra notation of a page’s keywords for search engine spiders. Meta tags should be just a small part of a good search engine optimisation strategy, and the meta keyword tag was only ever a way to provide a small boost to a page’s keywords. Other meta tags, such as the meta title and meta description tags should still play a part in your site’s SEO plan, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about optimising tags.

The meta keyword tag may have fallen by the wayside because it was so obviously meant for search engines alone. Title tags and meta description tags are likely to stay relevant to search engines as they are generally visible to a site’s users, the title tag in particular. As SEO strategies become more subtle, the search engines are obviously struggling to keep their results as natural as possible.

This isn’t the first time meta keyword tags have been declared dead. The wavering use of them in search engine algorithms has led to SEO companies declaring them useless since at least 2002. But even with Yahoo’s confirmation, the tag isn’t out of the game entirely, as sites that pay for inclusion with Yahoo! may choose to continue to use the tag, as can anyone who needs it for a custom feature. It is unlikely, however, that many websites will continue to spend time on a tag that all major search engines have so bluntly stated has no relevance to their search engine rankings.

It is thought that Yahoo! was the only one of the three major search engines to include consideration of the meta keyword tag for years. Google has firmly noted on Google Blog that the search engine’s algorithm ‘disregards keyword meta tags completely’.

There are no guarantees in the SEO business, and certainly no guarantees that the meta keywords tag is out of consideration forever. Even in announcing that they have no interest in the meta keywords tag, Google noted that the tag was to be ignored ‘at present’. There is always the admittedly slim possibility that the keywords meta tag may creep back in to the algorithms as the search engines get ever more desperate for ways to boost organic search.

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