What Are Meta Keywords?

Date First Published: 29th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 6/10

Learn more about what meta keywords are in this article.

Meta keywords are a type of meta tag that allows relevant keywords of the page to be specified to give search engines more information about the topic of the page. The keywords are separated by commas and the ideal amount of keywords to add per page is 3-20. Like all meta tags, this meta keywords tag is not visible to users unless they view the source code, but visible to search engine bots. An example of the meta keywords tag can be seen below:

Is The Meta Keywords Tag Still Used?

Originally, the keywords that website owners put into this tag would be used as a ranking factor by the search engines to determine the order that pages are listed based on their relevancy. The meta keywords tag has been around since 1995 when people were searching the World Wide Web using AltaVista and Infoseek. Even though the meta keywords tag can still be used in a HTML document, search engines, such as Google and Bing have not used this meta tag to rank webpages for a very long time. The main reason why is because of keyword stuffing. If search engines used the meta keywords tag to rank pages, it is like a website owner is asking a search engine to just rank them for whatever keyword they specify, even if it is unrelated to the page.

As the World Wide Web became commercial, website owners started spamming the keywords tag, inserting irrelevant words about their page content, and repeating the same keywords in the hope of manipulating the search results. As a result, search engines started to ignore it. In September 2009, Google officially announced that the keywords meta tag in web ranking is not used as Matt Cutts released a video in 2009 and said "We don't use the keywords meta tag in our search ranking". In October 2009, Bing announced that they no longer use the meta keywords tag anymore. Bing does index them, but they won't help with SEO at all and Bing might use them to determine whether a page is trying to spam.

Altavista dropped support for the tag in 2001 after stating that they "have found that the high incidence of keyword repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality". Since search engines have stopped using them, opinions on that topic vary with some website owners still using them and others being strongly against using them. Some may add misspellings of important words in the tag so that some search engines can understand which misspellings are relevant to the page.

The meta keywords tag may still be a minor factor for Yandex. A Yandex support page says that the meta keywords element "Can be used when determining the page's relevance to search queries", but this does not mean that it is a proven factor in Yandex Search.

Other Purposes

Keyword tags are still used for other purposes, such as creating a tagging system in WordPress with SEO plugins. This will make it easier to determine whether a keyword has already been targeted across another page. In some cases, they can be used for improving internal search. If a website allows its users to search the website for specific words, meta keywords can be used to make this process easier. However, this use of meta keywords is not very common and is considered an outdated method of providing internal search features. They can also be used to take a look at competitors that have those keywords in the meta tags so that a website owner can find out who they are competing against on the search engine results page.