META Keywords

When search engines started becoming popular, webmasters started adding the <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3"> tag to the head sections of their pages. The keywords would be similar to what we call search terms. This method worked well to help the search engines determine a page's subject, until, of course, the system was abused. Search engines changed their algorithms to ignore the META KEYWORDS tag and to search for keywords within page content.

Today, most search engines ignore the META KEYWORDS tag. Some search engines use the tag to find out how honest the webmaster is: If the search engines finds keywords in the META KEYWORDS tag, it compares those keywords to the keywords it finds in the page's content. If the keywords do not match, the search will think the page is trying to trick it and penalize its search result ranking.

Because the META KEYWORDS tag does not provide any benefits for search result ranking and adds additional maintenance to pages, we recommend that you do not use it for your pages.