For years, webmasters have focused (often myopically) on the keywords and description meta tags on their web sites. These are bits of information which are “in” a web page but are not visible to the humans who read the page. They look something like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Tips, hints, and musings on web design, e-commerce, and the internet by the staff of Hen’s Teeth Network.” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”web design, e-commerce, technology, web hosting, Hen’s Teeth Network” />
Ostensibly, these tags give accurate information about the page, hence the name “meta,” but they are more often abused than used. It has turned into a virtual arms race, with site owners frantically visiting competitors’ web sites and copying the “good” keywords and “best” descriptive phrases into the meta tags on their own sites. Some webmasters go so far as to place their competitors’ company names in their own keywords fields, in hopes of capturing search traffic and diverting it to their own e-commerce stores.
We have always advised clients to do search engine optimization (SEO) primarily by focusing on the human readable content on the page. We do help clients get reasonable stuff into the description and keywords meta tags but keep steering them back to the real content; that is where the effort needs to be placed. If people can quickly find useful information on a page, Google will, too.
Google recently published Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking on the Google Webmaster Central blog, completing supporting our position.
Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no….Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No… we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets [but] we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.
If you are trying to get your web site to show up well in search engines, toss something reasonable into the meta keywords and meta description tags but do not obsess about them. Put your real time and effort into improving the real content that real people read.