Meta Keywords

TL;DR

Meta keywords fall into the category of meta tags and are elements that, when added to the source code of a page, should provide more information about the content of the webpage. However, more recently, it has been shown that they are not taken into account by search engine algorithms, making them redundant for SEO.

What are Meta Keywords?

Meta keywords are a type of meta tag that are used to give additional information about the contents of a given webpage. The content of meta keywords is only visible to bot crawlers, in the page source code. They are not displayed to users.

The tag has the following form in the page source code: <meta name="keywords" content=”...”>. One may add relevant keywords between the brackets in the content section, separated by commas. There is no limit to the number of keywords added here.

Are Meta Keywords good for SEO? 

Several experts from the industry have tested the use of meta keywords and have come to the same conclusion: this type of meta tag has become redundant. Most likely, search engines have decided to overlook it entirely, because of the tendency of website owners to abuse it through keyword stuffing. This means that some webmasters would insert here a great deal of keywords, hoping to rank for as many search queries as possible, regardless of the actual relevance of these keywords to the content.

Therefore, while there is no indication that using meta keywords can hurt your SEO, adding them to your backend does not seem to help either. Some websites still make use of them and even some SEO tools/modules/plugins still give the option of filling them in for optimizing your pages. A similar way of describing content is still very popular in a CMS such as Wordpress, where the use of “tags” for blog posts is seen very often.