Meta Tags – Are Keywords Extinct?

One of the questions I see often is “What keywords should I use in the meta-tags on my web page?”

The answer to the question, oddly enough, is actually “None.” Keywords, it seems, really might be extinct. But why?

In the early days of the world wide web, when web search engines were in their infancy, before the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” had even been thought of, the folks who set the standards for HTML coding decided that it might be a good idea for each web page to contain some useful information about itself.

This meta-information, they reasoned, could be used to identify the page, tell us something about what it’s about, who wrote it, how often it’s updated, and what keywords it ought to be indexed on. It sounded terribly useful, and I’m sure it came under the general heading of “good idea” at the time.

This information has become known today as meta-tags and you can see them in action on almost any web page, if you examine the page source and look in the header section.

At the time, the search engine developers were excited about it, and totally embraced the idea of using meta-tags in web pages. This information promised to make their lives easier, as they provided a standard and simple way of identifying the key information on a page.

For a while (probably a very short while), everything was great – but the honeymoon didn’t last long…

Eventually, the time came when the best things about HTML were meta-tags and the worst things about HTML were meta-tags.

Something the human race really excels at is abusing ideas and concepts and putting them to ill-advised use. I believe it was Albert Einstein who once said something like:

“If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar power years ago.”

So, as with all good things, people soon found ways to abuse meta-tags to the point where they became all but useless to the search engines. Unscrupulous web writers found that, by adding many and often irrelevant keywords to the meta-tags, they could fool the search engines into thinking their pages were really important, thereby raising them to the top of the search list.

So, the war began…

…with the search engines committed to producing a fair and accurate index on one side – and the over-zealous web programmers on the other side, constantly trying to outwit the search engines in order to propel their site to the top of the search results.

After a time, Google et al decided to give up using the keywords from the meta-tags in favor of analyzing the detail on the page itself to determine keyword relevance for that page.

So, in a nutshell, keyword meta-tags are no longer very important (I certainly don’t use them in any of my pages) and they can be safely ignored, at least for the moment.

However, there is still at least one meta-tag that is important – the “description” meta tag, which will be the topic of the next post on this subject of search engine optimization.

For Zenologue Insider Members Only - Print Article or Save To PDF:

Connect With The Photography Coach On Google+

Other Photography Business, SEO & Marketing Articles You Might Enjoy:

Take A Second To Share Your Thoughts - Add A Comment:

Share these photography business ideas with others:

Photography Website SEO search engine optimization