It’s been suspected to varying degrees in the SEO community for a while now, but we finally have it from the horse’s mouth: Google does not use the keywords tag when ranking search results. It’s not downweighted, it’s not a minor influencing factor that you should consider but not worry about spending weeks on, it’s an irrelevance. Pump your website’s keywords meta tag full of all the carefully selected keywords you like, but according to Google it won’t make the slightest difference to how your website ranks in a standard Google search.
And it’s not like the Description tag, either: while your description doesn’t influence your ranking, Google will quite often display it within the listings, so it’s absolutely worth making sure your descriptions are as honed and inviting as possible because they’re going to play a huge part in influencing potential visitors to click. Keywords? Nope, they’re not even seen.
So, you don’t really need to bother with the keywords tag at all, then, do you?
Well… this is where I don my ‘Google Is Not The Internet’ t-shirt. It’s a phenomenally successful and innovative enterprise, and there’s no denying that it’s the most commonly used search engine out there (let’s face it, when a product name finds itself being used as a verb you know it’s a winner), but it’s not the only one in the world. There’s Ask, Yahoo!, Bing… well, you get the idea.
So, while you shouldn’t expect carefully crafted keyword tags to send floods of eager customers to your website by placing you right at the top of the rankings in Google, the best advice we have at the moment is that it’s still likely to be worth putting in the effort for the benefit of the share of the search market that’s not Google’s. Which means that the advice we gave in our SEO Tips article on Maximising Meta Tags still applies: keep the contents of your keywords meta tag short, sweet, and relevant.
