The Importance of the Keyword Meta Tag
December 10, 2009 
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Anyone that has a website knows that meta tags should be utilized on every page that is on public domain. Meta tags are a useful tool to let visitors and search engines know what your page is about and the information on it. The three meta tags that are usually updated are the Title, Description, and Keyword tags. Most webmasters update all the meta tags according to each page, but some are now going in another direction. We are going to provide insight into the importance of the Keyword meta tag.
For quite some time, the main search engines have no longer given any weight into the keyword meta tag due in part because of webmaster keyword stuffing this tag. Most of the keywords in the tag did not match up with the topic of the page, so it will reduced in importance. Reduced to almost nothing. Google has stated numerous times that the keyword meta tag is not used in their search algorithm. The other engines still look at the tag, but most give it little to no weight in their algorithm, but since Google has over 60% of the market share, it is important to look at what they are doing.
While we still tell most new webmasters to include the keyword tag because it is a good practice to be able to keep up with all three tags, we tend to tell seasoned webmasters a different story. Reason being, we have found that the only thing the keyword tag is good for is competition spying. Most competitors of yours can use your keyword tag to see what keywords you are going after on each page. This can help them discover good keywords to compete with you directly in natural and paid search. Don’t get us wrong, this can be good as well for you if your competitors use them, so you can see what keywords they are using and trying to optimize for.
While the importance of the keyword meta tag has decreased to almost nothing over the years in the eyes of the big search engines, it can still be useful for keyword gathering and competitive analysis. If you are a new webmaster, try and use the keyword meta tag in order to get versed in adding new keywords for each page that you have on your site. Try not to duplicate the keywords on different pages and keep them unique. So in the end, if you site is large and you have a very competitive environment, don’t use keyword tags, but if your site is small, then keep placing them in there.
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