Keyword Meta tag

Is it even necessary anymore?

[crobb305]

Do keyword meta tags add any value to the page or SE rankings? I have had a tendency lately to not even include this tag because after 5 years, I have seen them do very little for me. And I hate sitting there typing in keywords. I like to get my content posted, and use as few meta tags as possible.

Is that bad? Anyone seen evidence to the contrary these days?

C

[moishe]

I have quit using them as well, to my mind they are just extra code that slows down the loading of a page and more typing for me.
I do, of course, continue to use META description as that seems to be the prefered text to be shown in Googles search results and thus is obviously read by the gbot...

I have seen no evidence that leaving out the META Keyword tag has had any affect what so ever.

[pageoneresults]

I have seen no evidence that leaving out the META Keyword tag has had any affect what so ever.

Is it time to officially declare the META Keywords tag as Deprecated?

Do we have conclusive evidence that the tag is no longer being utilized from an SEO standpoint? How about from other indexers such as libraries or online archives? Have they also stopped using the META Keywords Tag in their algos?

[crobb305]

I guess some older or less sophisticated search programs still utilize keyword meta. I don't know for certain. But I just find the tag to be a nuisance when I am trying to quickly add articles/content pages. The only meta tags I use are title and description (though some of my older pages still have keyword tags).

C

[pageoneresults]

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword phrase 1, keyword phrase 2, keyword phrase 3">

Make it easy on yourself and just use the primary keyword phrases for the page. Don't look at it as trying to target every known keyword for that page. Pull a phrase from the title, the first heading and maybe from the first paragraph of content.

Typically I will save the Description and Keywords tags for last. I've already built the page. I am very intimate with its content. I can easily craft a meta description and keywords tag after the fact. This is for static sites. Dynamic sites are of course a little different. ;)

Yahoo! mentions in their guidelines how to format the keywords tag for their robot.