SEO Myth #3 – If I put my keywords in my meta tags, this helps my rankings

It’s surprising that people still believe that meta tags are how you get your site ranked. If you’re not in the business of SEO, though, this common misconception is widely accepted. However, all SEOs know that all the major search engines completely ignore the meta keywords tag. And if you find an SEO that doesn’t know this, fire them, or smack them.

I remember the good old days when all I had to do was stick some keywords in a meta tag and bam! – top rankings galore. But as with everything else, those nasty spammers ruin it for everyone. It finally got to the point where the major engines (we’re talking Google, Yahoo, MSN, and even Ask) finally said, “you know what? Forget about it. We’re not even going to pay attention to those tags.” So they completely skip over them… unless… (yes, there’s an exception here) UNLESS, you’re stuffing your meta keywords tags with the same word over and over, or the words in the meta keywords tag don’t appear on the page, or your meta keywords tag is duplicated on any other page.

So, the search engines ignore your meta keywords tag unless you try to abuse it, and then they penalize you. So why would we even bother adding meta keywords tags? For a couple reasons. There are that tiny percentage of search engines out there who still read the tags. We don’t want to leave anyone out, and you never know where that one big sale or lead might come from, so we make sure they’re in there for all the little guys. The other reason we still create meta keywords tags is because you never know when the search engines will start reading them again. Stranger things have happened. Even Google says, “we ignore them, but still put them in.” And I know I don’t want that job to go add meta keywords to 1000’s of pages if the engines suddenly decide to recognize them again.

It’s important to clarify here that we are talking about the meta keywords tag. There’s another little meta tag called the meta description tag, which still gets read, and might help out a little. So don’t get the two confused. The meta description tag follows the same rules – no keyword stuffing, only use words that appear in that page’s content, and don’t use the same description twice – no duplicates. The meta description is usually what appears on a search results page, so it should entice the user to click through to your site. It may help your rankings a bit, too, so make sure you’re using keywords.

Your time and energy will be much more well spent on creating quality content for your site, rather than fine tuning the meta tags. Just don’t break the rules, and you’re good to go.