Should you use meta keywords?
Meta Keywords - Should You Use Them? How many should be used? These are all questions people ask frequently, and with some much older information available on the web today, many people new to SEO are not sure if they should use the meta keyword tag or not.
What Are Meta Keywords?
Meta keywords are a <meta> tag option that could be used to give more information to search engines on what a page is about.
A meta keywords element was placed in the Head section of the HTML of your webpage, and look like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">
The <meta> tag defines what types of metadata are associated with an HTML document. These meta tags can be found on the source pages of a website, which are crawled by web crawlers to determine what the page is about. The question is, should the keyword meta tag be used? If yes, in what cases and in what quantity?
Are Meta Keywords Important for Google?
Google employees first stated in 1998 that the Keywords meta tag is not considered by Google, and that web developers and SEOs should not waste their precious time filling it out.
Are Meta Keywords Important for Yandex?
The official documentation states that Meta Keywords can be used to determine if a page matches search queries. When using such a tag, it is worth considering the content of the page: all key phrases must accurately describe the content. It can be either single words or phrases. The main thing is that they rely on the content of the web page, and not on the search engine.
Meta Keywords Example
A meta description for this page could be:
“what is a meta keywords, meta keywords, meta tag, seo meta keywords, seo keywords”
For example, how this meta-keywords is viewed in the page code:
<head> <meta name="keywords" content="what is a meta keywords, meta keywords, meta tag, seo meta keywords, seo keywords"> </head>
Meta Keywords Tips
- keywords or phrases must be separated by a comma
- total length of all keys cannot exceed 255 characters
- don't spam with identical keywords
- keys should be written in lowercase
- repeating words can have a negative effect on page rankings - for example, it is better to write "sell a computer, a computer is cheap" than "sell a computer, sell a computer is cheap."
- use unique phrases for each page
- don't include tags on form and contact pages
Useful online meta keywords checker tool
On-page SEO Checker - This tool analyzes your website. It will give you a list of warnings, recommendations, and where exactly the website is having trouble, including missing and duplicate meta keywords.
Keyword Extractor - This tool analyzes your website. It allows you to extract keywords from web pages. Once extracted, the keywords are displayed in the output area and you can save them for SEO analysis.