Don't Waste Time on Keywords

A lot of people, when trying to optimise their websites for search performance, spend far too much time trying to stuff their page full of keyword meta-tags. Unfortunately this is almost a complete waste of effort.

What are keyword meta-tags?

The structure of any HTML page allows content creators to add a range of meta-information - in other words, what the page is about. These can include the title of the page and a short description or summary. While this information can be very useful, it is not visible to anyone reading the page in a standard web browser. However, search engines read the entire HTML code, including the meta-tags.

The keywords meta-tag is a set of words or phrases that describe the page content. Search optimisation practitioners have for a long time used these tags to drive search traffic to the site. Some have even included meta-tags that aren't visible on the page, such as common misspellings of a word or terms that are loosely related to the page content. Some even get a bit sneaky.

For example, a local shop called Bob's BBQs could include obvious keywords like BBQ, rotisserie or steak. They might also include brands they sell such as Weber or Beefmaster or the location of the shop. They could include various spellings such as BBQ, barbecue and barbeque. And if they were being devious, they might also include the names of competitors such as Barbeques Galore, in the hope that people searching for that company might be encouraged to visit the Bob's BBQs site instead.

Search engines don't rate keywords

Unfortunately, all this effort is essentially for nothing, because search engines ignore these meta-tag keywords almost without exception.

In this blog post, Matt Cutts from Google's search quality team explains why. In essence, when deciding on a page's search ranking, Google only looks at the elements on the page that a human reader can see. This seems entirely sensible and fair. (Google also looks at a number of factors off the page, such as the number of links to it, but that's for another time.)

Google accounts for 86% of Australian searches. Microsoft's Bing also ignores keywords, and makes up about 4% of local searches. Yahoo! still rates keywords, but only represents 7% of the market. In other words, keywords are a lot of effort for a very small result.

Some uses for keywords

Does that make keywords a completely fruitless exercise? Yes and no.

Coming up with a list of keywords is important, because it focuses your mind on the sort of things people are likely to be searching for when you want them to visit your page. These are exactly the things that should be on your page, not hidden away in the keywords.

Sometimes you might write a web page that is about a particular topic, but where it would be clunky or forced to include that phrase in the text. For instance, while this article is about search engine optimisation, I haven't used the phrase 'search engine optimisation' until now. Blog engines allow you to include lists of topics or tags for each article so I could tag this article with 'search engine optimisation' even if I didn't use the phrase in the text. That way, the phrase I want is on the page and can be indexed by search engines.

Finally, your website's internal search function may index the meta-tag keywords. So keywords can be a useful way of helping site users find their way around, if they use your site's search function.

For more information, contact Josh Mehlman, Online Strategy Leader, Editor Group on jmehlman@editorgroup.com or +61 2 8912 9510.

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