There is a heated debate going on in the Web design and search engine optimization industries regarding the use and effectiveness of meta tags, specifically, meta tag keywords.
Opponents of Meta Tag Keyword Use
Many designers and optimizers today argue that meta tag keywords have been rendered useless by search engines, namely Google, as the result of excessive liberties taken by online marketers and entrepreneurs in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they inserted countless keywords into their meta tags that had nothing to do with the nature of their websites or businesses in order to bring their sites closer to the top of search engine results on any given search term.
As a consequence, many of these designers and optimizers no longer bother creating meta tag keywords for their online projects, calling it a waste of time since, in their eyes, they are no longer relevant.
Proponents of Meta Tag Keyword Use
On the other side of the debate, many others are arguing that meta tag keywords are still considered by Google and other search engines when it comes to cataloging and ranking search results and are therefore still a valuable search engine optimization tool to have.
Even if Google no longer took them into consideration, these proponents of meta tag keywords say, there are still many search engines out there across the Internet that do, search engines that many people have never heard of. Nonetheless, they are still used by Web surfers. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are not the only search engines around.
What Google and Other Popular Websites are Saying
The good news for these proponents though, is that Google does in fact still take into consideration all the different elements that comprise meta tags. An article titled, Are META and ALT tags still important?, found on the Doteasy blog, confirms this, citing statements from the official Google Blog.
Also, many of the Internet's most visible and trafficked websites emphasize the importance of keyword use. For example, this very website, Suite101, has a tutorial titled, Why Keywords Matter, which offers advice to its writers on how to come up with effective keywords in order to improve search results for their articles.
Scribd, another immensely popular website that allows content developers to freely share their creations with the world by simply creating a profile and uploading files (users can also choose to sell their works on the site, such as eBooks), insists that the user enter keywords with each work that is published in order to improve search results. Each work is then allotted its own unique URL address.
Conclusions
Meta tags, and namely meta tag keywords, are still considered by Google and other search engines when it comes to cataloging and ranking search results for Web surfers. It has been demonstrated that some of the Web's best known and most trafficked websites continue to rely on the use of meta tag keywords for beneficial search results.
The fact that serious abuses of meta tag keywords once occurred, though unfortunate, is in the past. Since then, search engines have become "smarter" -- they are now capable of better detecting these sorts of abuses and will simply blacklist a website from their search results if an Internet marketer or entrepreneur feels compelled to try to relive the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The key, when it comes to using meta tag keywords, is simply not to abuse them. Keywords should match the overall theme, or nature, of the site and should be found naturally within the content, or copy, of it. The other elements that comprise the full meta tag, such as the meta description, should do the same. Also, as a general rule of thumb, no part of a keyword should be used more than five times in a meta tag. Google and other search engines may deem this as spamming.
When all of these elements are acting in cohesive harmony -- keywords, description, and content, the result is a truly optimized website.
Aaron Scott Robertson - Journalist, author, public servant, and president of Intrepid Innovations Inc.
