In this article, I would explain to you about the meta keyword tag. I had to study the history of Google SEO in order to create this article. Meta keyword tag (s) are connected to Google SEO history. Let me explain why? Also, I would explain if these keywords are important or not? Google over the years has become more cautious of webmasters taking advantage of their systems. Let us break it down and study this meta keyword tag in detail. Most important is Meta Robots Attribute.
What is a Meta Keyword Tag?
The meta keyword tag in Google SEO is the snippet that describes your page in Google search results. It is not necessary for this tag to appear on the page. It can appear in the code of the page as well. However, the purpose of this code is to tell Google about the content which is there on the webpage. To simplify and to make you understand please look at the image below. This tag is from one of my webpage related to cycling hashtags for Instagram. This page is ranking at number 7th on the Google search results. (Phew took a while)
Yes, they do, but not all of them and not all of the time. The simple answer is that they used to. However, now they don’t pay attention to these tags too much. A part of their system still looks at them, however, the importance is not given to these tags much. If you want to find out whether a given page is using meta tags, just right-click anywhere on the page and select “View Page Source.” The meta tag will show like the highlighted code in the below image.
I took the source code of the same page which is ranking at number 7th in Google search.
Knowing Your Meta Tags
Let us talk more in detail and let’s get to know about the types of meta tags. There are four types of Meta Tags. All these four different tags have a different purpose and they pass a great deal of information to Google about your page. Let’s list them before getting into more details about them.
- Meta Keywords Attribute – A series of keywords you deem relevant to the page in question.
- Title Tag – This is the heading you will see at the top of your browser. Search engines view this text as the “title” of your page.
- Meta Description Attribute – A brief description of your web page.
- Meta Robots Attribute – An indication to search engine crawlers (robots or “bots”) as to what they should do with the page.
Now let’s talk in details about each one of them.
Meta Keywords Attribute
Google has stopped taking this into considerations as it’s too easy to abuse. Webmasters have been stuffing keywords and getting traffic from popular websites. Even though the web page is not relevant, however, just to get the traffic people were abusing it stuffed with keywords. Google eventually got wise to this and decided in the end to devalue the tool. These days Google doesn’t use meta keywords in its ranking algorithm at all, because they’re too easy to abuse.
Title Tag
This is the most important of all four meta keywords. These tags have a real impact on search rankings and, perhaps just as importantly, are the only one of the tags we’ll discuss here that are visible to the average user. You’ll find them at the top of your browser
This is particularly useful if you want to give the page one primary title for the user but want to clarify or simplify that information for SEO purposes and for the user who’s shuffling multiple tabs on their desktop.
Meta Description Attribute
Another important page component that appears in the search results. It explains to search engines and (sometimes) searchers themselves what your page is about. Furthermore, Google may decide to show your meta description in the search or it might pick up the text from the web page itself. However, this does not mean that this is not important. This means that meta description could entice searchers to click through from the SERP to your site, especially if the description includes the keywords they were searching for. Google’s reasons are somewhat mysterious, but their actions speak loudly: meta keywords don’t much matter anymore, but meta descriptions most certainly do.
Meta Robots Attribute
This attribute helps you to tell search engine like Google as to do what with your page.
- Index/No-Index: This will tell the search engine to show your page in Google SERP’s or not.
- Follow/no-Follow: This tells the engines what to do with links on your pages: whether they should trust and “follow” your links to the next page or not.
Meta Robots Attribute communicates with the search engine and tells them the relevancy of content. If the content should be shown in the search results or not.
Summing Up
Meta tags can be very helpful in SEO and online marketing. Let me sum up the points again for your reference.
- The Title Tag alone can impact your search engine rankings.
- Descriptive tags may encourage users to visit your site.
- The meta description may serve as “organic ad text.”
- Meta keywords are deprecated by most search engines.
If you have any question related to meta tags, please leave them in the comments below.
