Meta Keywords, Rest In Peace

In the last few months, both Yahoo and Google have publicly stated that they no longer support the keyword meta tag.  Bing has never used it.  What impact does this have on your website and search engine rankings?

Search engines have gotten a lot smarter over the last few years, and they’re now indexing sites by keywords located within the content.  While all three still use the title and description meta tags, they’re also looking through what’s actually written on your pages to help determine how your page ranks.  Sites with a density of particular keywords within their written content will rank higher than ones just using those keywords in the meta tags.

While Yahoo still technically uses the meta keyword tag, it only does so as the lowest ranking measure.

For your site to perform well, your content should be written with search engine traffic in mind.  Quality analytics reporting and research should help you identify which keywords will deliver customers to your site, and quality content will help ensure your pages rank high enough for those keywords to take advantage of browsing customers-to-be.