It used to be all you had to do was stuff your Meta Tag Keywords full of the phrases that you wanted people to use to find you in search engines. Then along came Google. Google decided to rank websites by the quantity and quality of links into the website, and by the content on the website.

Unfortunately that meant that a lot of website designers stopped using Meta Tags. A lot of Search Engine Optimization ‘Specialists’ announced that Meta Tags were ‘dead’, content was King and Links were Queen.

The Search Engine Optimization specialists were partly right. Meta Tags have been de-valued by most search engines. They are however still very important, and you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot by not using them effectively.

Why use Meta Keywords?

Meta Keywords – found in the ‘Head’ section of a web page – are still used as a website content yardstick by many smaller search engines. As I’m sure you’re aware, it’s not good in any business just to rely on one ‘golden goose’. Although Google (which is used by around 50% of all web searches) appears not to be counting Meta Keywords in page relevance presently, it tends to change its search engine ‘algorithm’ every few months.

This means that even if you just want visitors from Google, (for some reason wanting to alienate half of the Internet search audience) you may not be missing out on anything today, is it really worth the risk if Google’s complicated algorithm changes again in the near future?

Meta Keywords and their positioning

Now that you’ve decided that you need to include Meta Keywords in each of your pages, which keywords should you use and how should they be positioned?

1) First of all, you should only use keyword phrases that are contained in the page content of your web page as well. Otherwise you may be suspected as attempting to mislead search engines.

2) Secondly you should separate every different keyword phrase with a comma then a space.

3) Thirdly you should never use the same word in keyword phrases next to each other.

4) Fourthly you should never use the same single keyword more than three times.

5) Fifthly you should never repeat a keyword phrase in the Keyword Meta Tags.

6) Sixthly you should position your most important keyword phrase near the start of your Meta Tag Keywords. There is not great value in having more than 6 keyword phrases per page, and having more than 9 may have a detrimental effect.

A good example of Meta Keywords

A good example of Meta Keywords is as follows. Note that it is assumed that all of the following keyword phrases are included in the page content.