Here's a quick and easy way to tell if your webmaster has a clue about search engine optimization (SEO): just ask them about the importance of "meta tag keywords".

If their answer is that they are crucial to your ranking on search engines, it's time for a new webmaster (or at least to send them back to training).

SEO is a constantly changing field, because search engines are always updating their algorithms to return what they consider to be the best search results. But this particular misconception has lingered on forever — meta tag keywords lost their power years ago.

Death Of A Meta Tag sums it up nicely from one of the real SEO experts, Danny Sullivan. This was written almost four years ago.

Bottom line? Meta tag keywords have almost no effect on your search page rankings. If you don' t have them on your website, don't worry about. If you are designing a new website, don't spend more than five minutes putting in meta tag keywords.

1 Response...

1. Ruth Cox says:

   June 6, 2007 at 4:33 pm

   You are so right! Content is king, but make it usable for your customers, change it often being mindful about your keywords, and the search engines just seem to follow.