Meta Keywords

Most people nowadays have some clue of the importance of keywords, however they often think about the wrong keyword concept, being meta keywords.

What are Meta Keywords?

Meta Keywords are words entered in the code of a webpage. These words are not visible on the page itself. In the source code of a webpage they look like this:

<meta name="keywords" content="New Orleans, hotel, French Quarter, accommodation, etc.">

What is the purpose of Meta Keywords?

Originally the meta  keywords were meant to categorize what your website was about. A very good idea. But as these keywords are invisible for the viewer, they were quickly misused by webdevelopers and SEO companies to influence the search engine rankings.

Use Meta Keywords or not?

Many inexperienced web developers or DIY website builders still put endless lists of keywords in their pages and think this will help them being found better. Nowadays the opposite is true. Google will actually punish you for keyword stuffing as they want their results to be fair and not manipulated.

Some people still use the meta keywords and as long as you don’t overdo it it won’t hurt. But it won’t help either, so I don’t waste my time thinking about meta keywords or putting them in.

The right way to work with keywords

Now the right way to use keywords is by using them in the visible text of your webpages. How to do this and how to find the right keywords is something I will cover in a next post.