B2B SEO: Why You Should Include Meta Keyword Tags
A recent post on NaturalSearchBlog brings up the oft-discussed question of whether or not it pays to include meta keyword tags on website pages anymore. Briefly, it is generally agreed that Google no longer uses these meta tags to assign relevance or page rank and therefore it doesn’t do a website marketer any good.
Those weighing in against the use of meta tags say “why bother”. The pro-meta tag groups says “why not”.
At Tatum Marketing we tend to fall into the “why not” group. Google may not use it to help determine rank, but Ask and Yahoo and smaller, older search engines – to a certain extent – still do. So why not put your keywords in there?
The author of Why Avoiding Meta Keyword Tags May Be Best points out that he or she has seen a number of sites that have been punished by Google for overstuffing keywords into the meta tags or including words that don’t appear on the page. In the words of that author “since so many people do this wrong, it’s better just to leave it off entirely. It’s just not worth it.”
To get a better understanding of what this means, I turned to our chief SEO strategist, Eric Gerds. He doesn’t exactly agree.
“It’s the same thing as putting too many keywords in your page content,” Eric patiently explained to me. “If you abuse it, Google will knock you down”.
Eric stands by his belief that using meta keyword tags can be useful. While he recommends against spending precious time struggling over it, he wouldn’t avoid using them.
“Meta tags cost very little to add,” says Eric. “And there is evidence that other search engines do pay attention.”
So for now, we’ll continue to use them. What about you? Do you believe in meta tags?
Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, Google, Yahoo, Ask, keywords
This article was first published September 23, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog
A recent post on NaturalSearchBlog brings up the oft-discussed question of whether or not it pays to include meta keyword tags on website pages anymore. Briefly, it is generally agreed that Google no longer uses these meta tags to assign relevance or page rank and therefore it doesn’t do a website marketer any good.
Those weighing in against the use of meta tags say “why bother”. The pro-meta tag groups says “why not”.
At Tatum Marketing we tend to fall into the “why not” group. Google may not use it to help determine rank, but Ask and Yahoo and smaller, older search engines – to a certain extent – still do. So why not put your keywords in there?
The author of Why Avoiding Meta Keyword Tags May Be Best points out that he or she has seen a number of sites that have been punished by Google for overstuffing keywords into the meta tags or including words that don’t appear on the page. In the words of that author “since so many people do this wrong, it’s better just to leave it off entirely. It’s just not worth it.”
To get a better understanding of what this means, I turned to our chief SEO strategist, Eric Gerds. He doesn’t exactly agree.
“It’s the same thing as putting too many keywords in your page content,” Eric patiently explained to me. “If you abuse it, Google will knock you down”.
Eric stands by his belief that using meta keyword tags can be useful. While he recommends against spending precious time struggling over it, he wouldn’t avoid using them.
“Meta tags cost very little to add,” says Eric. “And there is evidence that other search engines do pay attention.”
So for now, we’ll continue to use them. What about you? Do you believe in meta tags?
December 20th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
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