Convention wisdom in the SEO Community is that the keywords meta tag is cooked. And majority of SEOs don’t even bother with populating this field anymore and haven’t for some time now.

What is the Keyword Meta Tag?

For anyone who is unaware, the keyword meta tag is a method of inserting text into a web page that is invisible when the page is viewed through a browser. The object of the keywords meta tag is that search engines would read the list of keywords in the tag and associate them with the words on the page’s visible body copy to create a more powerful keyword campaign and better search rankings.

Keywords Meta Tag is Alive!

I recently read a post on Mathew Martinez’s blog, SEO Theory (which I highly recommend), that despite conventions in the SEO Community that the keywords meta tag is a useless piece of code, he argues that Yahoo does in fact include the keywords tag in its algorithm for search rankings. If this is the case, then it would dispel conventional wisdom. But the only way to be certain about this assertion is to conduct my own test.

Testing the Theory

To put this theory to the test, I conducted a simple experiment with pretty conclusive results. I own a host of domains, one being a self-promotional, resume website: Ken Lyons – Boston SEO, Web Marketing Consultant. The URL is lyonsprops.com, and no it’s not about giving “props” to myself-as some have implied. It’s actually an old site I had when I was an aspiring real estate developer that I didn’t want to go to waste. But I digress.

At lyonsprops.com, I was getting great rank in Google and MSN for keywords “Ken Lyons” and “Boston SEO,” which I’d optimized the site for. But my Yahoo rank was always way off. For “Ken Lyons,” I ranked 14; and for “Boston SEO,” I ranked 48. Not terrible, but not great compared to first page rank in Google for both terms. So I constantly wondered what was causing the descrepency with Yahoo. In fact, it wasn’t just my site I noticed it with. The inconsistency with Yahoo occurred on a few client sites as well.

Test Results

After reading Martinez’s blog post on Yahoo using the keywords tag in their algorithm, I was hopeful and added the keywords tag and subsequent keywords to the lyonsprops.com page, on Sept.26, 2008. On Oct. 20, I ran a rank check again and was delighted with the Yahoo results:

• “Ken Lyons” had jumped from 14 to 7
• “Boston SEO” shot from 48 to 14

All this from adding the keyword tag (and nothing else), which I’d previously been ignoring because the consensus among the SEO community is that the tag is dead.

Now, granted this is a very small sample, but the results are enough to convince me to revive the keywords meta tag on all my web pages from here on out.



- MetaRocket SEO is a Boston SEO Company