Forum Moderators: open
I'd also echo Marcia's comments and suggest that an exact match between the words in a meta element and the words on a page is not really the issue - what's required is a relationship between the contents of both, and if it's SEO you're after, a relationship that your target search engine is capable of identifying.
Google and other search engines doesn't cares if you put targeted keywords in meta area
I'd agree that meta keywords are a waste of time, apart from perhaps a few very fringe cases.
Personally, I think the keywords meta element has so little weight that you'd be hard pressed to do anything that qualified as 'bad'. The strongest I'd go for would be 'pointless'.
I agree. It's almost pointless to spend effort thinking about the keywords meta.
That said, if your page were ever flagged for manual review and you had a ridiculously spammy keywords meta, I tend to think that it would work against you with the manual reviewer.
Also, an historical footnote... way back, when Inktomi had a search engine, there was a time when they did look at meta keywords, and I remember one Inktomi search engineer telling me that they considered metas in the keywords that weren't also on the page as a spam signal.
More recently, several years back, Yahoo was hinting that they did look at meta keywords. The search boost that a meta keyword might provide for a word that might generally be found on pages was probably infinitesimally small, but it was thought that the inclusion might help with misspellings. I don't know where they are on this now.
These days the most common advice I give about meta keywords is: delete them, and don't spend any more time on them.
Yes, I completely agree. I've just been omitting the tag for a while now. There was a point where I was including keyword metas for "bookkeeping" purposes (or perhaps for the rare directory that might want to use them), but they're really not worth the effort.