One thing that many old SEO guides will mention is that in order to rank well on Google, you need to carefully craft your ‘keywords’ meta tag and stuff it with all sorts of relevant words. Even more modern SEO companies will mention this as one of the most important facets to a good rank.
However, they are wrong! – and have been for several years.
Google does not use the keywords meta tag to rank your site. In fact, they don’t rank sites based on any meta tags at all!
This isn’t to say they don’t use your meta tags – far from it! For instance, Google uses the description meta tag in order to generate the snippet of info displayed on the search results page.
So, what meta tags DO they use? Here’s a handy list (there are a few more niche tags too):
- description – this is used to generate the snippet on the search results page.
- robots – this is used to give instructions to web-crawler bots (or ‘spiders’) – e.g. ‘nofollow’ tells ‘bots to ignore any links on the page.
- googlebot – as the above ‘robots’ meta tag, but specific to Google.
- verify-v1 – used with Google’s webmaster tools to verify it’s link to your site is correct.
In short, don’t worry too much about your meta tags for SEO purposes. However, we are certainly not saying to ignore them! There are still a few other (less used) search engines and sites which may still use these tags for ranking, and they can be a great way to help categorise your site and add handy information to it.
Further information, and a handy video, are available on Google’s Blog at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html