- What are meta keywords?
- Why meta keywords are no longer relevant?
- Which Search Engines still use Meta Keywords?
- Should you remove meta keywords from your pages?
- If meta keywords are no longer valid for Google, what you should do?
- What are meta tags?
- Meta tags that search engines understand and are important for SEO
- Key Learnings
It might surprise many SEOs, but some search engines still use the meta keywords tag as part of their ranking process.
Major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing) no longer use it, but smaller search engines such as Yandex and Baidu (and possibly DuckDuckGo) still use it.
Don’t confuse meta keywords with other meta tags. Other meta tags (like page titles and descriptions) are used by search engines and they are valuable for SEO but meta keywords are not.
In this post, you’ll learn what meta keywords are and if they are still relevant for SEO.
What Are Meta Keywords?
Meta keywords are HTML tags that provide search engines with a list of relevant keywords related to a webpage’s content. They are placed in the page’s HTML source code and are invisible to visitors.
Here is an example of a meta keywords tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="meta keywords, meta tags, SEO, search engine optimization">
The name of the meta tag is keywords, and the value is defined in the content part.
In the content part, you should provide keywords relevant to the page content.
Search engines read the meta keywords tag as part of the crawling and indexing process and some might use them in ranking.
Like other meta tags, meta keywords are not visible to the user but are part of a page's source code.
To view a page's meta keywords (or any other meta tag), open the page in a web browser, right-click, and select VIEW SOURCE CODE.
Locate the top part of the page that is enclosed in <head></head> tags and look for META.
Here is an example of the meta tags used by this page.
Are Meta Keywords Still Relevant For SEO?
As you might have already guessed, having the keywords you wanted a page to rank in a meta tag makes it very easy to manipulate search algorithms. Soon enough, people started spamming search engines. The result is that the major search engines decided to drop meta keywords and remove them from their ranking process.
In particular:
- Google dropped meta keywords in 2009
- Yahoo stopped using meta keywords in 2009
- Bing announced in 2014 that they no longer consider meta keywords for ranking purposes
Which Search Engines Still Use Meta Keywords?
It might surprise many people, but two important search engines still use meta keywords as part of the ranking process.
Yandex– the most popular Russian search engine is using meta keywords as a way to determine the page’s relevance to search queries.
Baidu – the most popular Chinese search engine, is also using the meta keywords tag during the crawling and ranking phase.
Should You Remove Meta Keywords From Your Pages?
It depends on the case. If you care about organic traffic from Yandex and Baidu and you already have the meta keywords on your pages, then you can leave them.
If your main focus is Google traffic, you don’t need to add meta keywords for the sake of Yandex or Baidu. It’s a very lightweight SEO signal that does not deserve too much attention.
Which Meta Tags Are Important For SEO?
I've mentioned above that other meta tags are still important for SEO. The most critical to use are:
- Title tag
- Meta Descriptions tag
- Meta Robots tag
1. Title Tag
The title tag has this format:
<title>What are meta tags and why they are important for SEO</title> and is one of the most critical SEO elements.
The title tag is essential for SEO because:
- Gives search engines a big clue as to what the page is about.
- It is shown in the search results (first line of the search snippet).
- It is shown as the tab title in browsers.
- It is shown as the title of a post when shared on social media networks.
For more information on how to optimize your page title tags for SEO, read the following guides:
2. Meta Descriptions Tag
The meta description tag has this format:
<meta name="description" content="Meta keywords are not used by Google, Bing and Yahoo but they are taken into account by other search engines."/> and maybe shown as part of the search snippet in the SERPS (search engine results pages).
The meta description tag is important for SEO because:
- A compelling meta description tag will encourage users to click on your search snippet, resulting in more traffic and higher CTR (click-through rates).
- Search Snippets with a high CTR are more likely to appear in the results' top positions than snippets with a low CTR. This is an indirect SEO factor that has gained more importance in the last few years.
- Search engines tend to highlight search terms appearing in a meta description tag, which makes them more relevant to users and leads to more clicks.
For more information on how to best optimize your meta description tags for SEO, read the following guides:
3. Meta Robots Tag
The meta robots meta tag has the following format:
It is used to instruct search engines on how a particular page should be treated when it comes to search.
The most important values are:
- index - Allow search engines to index a page and show it in the search results
- follow - Follow any external links found on the page
- noindex - Instruct search engines not to index the page and not to show it in the search results
- nofollow - Don't follow external links from this page
Read this guide for a detailed description of all meta robots tag values.
The meta robots tag is important for SEO because a misconfiguration can prevent search engines from indexing a page, which means no rankings or traffic.
Optimizing the meta robots tag is part of technical SEO, the process of optimizing a website for the crawling and indexing phase.
Key Learnings
Meta keywords are an SEO technique used in the past for Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Other search engines like Yandex and Baidu still take them into account.
If you care about Yandex or Baidu traffic, you can add meta keywords to your pages, but it is very important that you do it right and avoid keyword stuffing.
Other meta tags are super important for SEO for ALL search engines.
So, as part of your on-page SEO optimization, pay special attention to your meta title tags, meta description tags, and meta robots tags.
