Before there was a Google, optimizing for other search engines included the step of having a meta keywords element in HTML for pages. These were elements that contained lists of keywords, usually separated by commas. These keywords were ones that you may have felt were relevant to the content on your pages, and that you would like your page to rank for. A meta keywords element was placed in the Head section of the HTML of your webpage, and looked like this:. In HTML 4, a meta element was one that is aimed at providing, "machine-readable information about HTML documents and other network-accessible resources.
The Meta Keyword Element was popular at search engines such as Altavista; however, its popularity waned, and it became less popular. There Danny told us that the meta keywords tag was only supported by one search engine at that time - Inktomi. He also told us that the first two search engines to start using meta keywords tags were Infoseek and Altavista. The late s appeared to be the time of the meta keyword element, according to Danny:.
Altavista dropped support for the tag in , after stating that they "have found that the high incidence of keyword repetition and spam made it an unreliable indication of site content and quality.
Curious about how modern SEOs might feel about the Meta Keywords Element today, I decided to run a poll asking about how people felt about it. I also asked for comments and received some interesting ones. Carrie Hill pointed out that the meta keywords element was useful when found on competitor's sites to see what keywords they optimized pages for:. Scott Hendison reminded us that the Yoast SEO Plugin made the meta Keywords element available to users until when it removed them for good.
Don Rhoades pointed out that some site searches still use meta Keyword elements:. JP Sherman affirmed this by telling us:. We do see Google telling us that they do not use the meta keywords element for their site search on their programmable search help metatags page. It may be possible that some other search engines may still use meta Keywords elements, as was pointed out to me:. Christi Olsen from Bing told me that they weren't using the Meta Keywords element and that they exclude it and ignore it:.
The meta keywords tag is not used by Google or Bing for indexing or ranking content. Meta keywords are dead for the major search engines so do not use them for SEO purposes. If you want to still use meta keywords to improve your rankings for other search engines, then make sure to follow the best practices mentioned in the next section. If you have a blog and want to optimize your content in the most efficient way, then I encourage you to read my post about what is SEO in blogging here.
You should also consider grabbing a copy of my Mastering On-Page SEO course that teaches you my proven on-page optimization techniques for higher rankings and traffic. As you discovered, the basic answer for what is a meta keyword is a set of phrases you add to the HTML code to indicate to search engines what topics a web page is covering in the content.
My goal is to share the best tips and news about search engine optimization so you can get more traffic to your website. Table of Contents. Stephen Hockman. Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. How many keywords are ideal for the META keywords tag? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 1 month ago.
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Active Oldest Votes. There is no official limit on the number of meta keywords you can have. Improve this answer. CristiC CristiC As a general rule, you should aim for the following character limits within each of your meta tags: Page title — 70 characters Meta description — characters Meta keywords — No more than 10 keyword phrases.
Chomel 7, 14 14 gold badges 40 40 silver badges 64 64 bronze badges. Muhammad Tahir Muhammad Tahir 31 1 1 bronze badge. You perform a pursuit filling so as to undertake out: Rundown thing certain catchphrases. The outcomes you will get is the title tag and Rundown thing the little content thing, the portrayal tag. Badol Badol 11 3 3 bronze badges.
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