End O’ The Line for Meta Keywords
It isn’t often that we say we just aren’t going to do something anymore because we don’t feel like it. But it does happen from time to time.
Case in point: Meta Keywords. The header meta tag for keywords was something that became important in the mid-90s as every search engine focused on expanding their index of site data, but it took exactly 5 minutes for people to start exploiting it. Packing your keywords with tons of keywords used to help your SERP ranking shoot up like crazy, but then came the days of “Google Bombing”.
So, for most of the last 10 years, search engines have been winding down the use of the meta keyword tag because they are getting smart enough to figure out what your site is about without needing you to tell them. Google and MSN/Bing havent supported the tag in years (they indexed/retrieved the data but it isn’t used in rankings) and now even Yahoo! and Ask (yes, people still use them) ignore the keywords as well. Heck, Google and Bing dont even have them on their own sites.
What does this have to do with us? Well, imagine asking a client for a list of 10-15 words that encompass their company and the content of their new site. Basically it is a disaster. We spend far too much time doing revisions to this list and editing them to make sure it is actually relevant, all with almost no benefit in return. It may total to only 1 hour on a project, but as a small company working on slim margins to pay the rent and churn out awesome new projects, 1 hour per project is important.
So, there might be times it is useful in the future, but from here out, we will not be including the header meta keywords tag on new client sites unless specifically requested.
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a022 posted this
