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Are Keywords Necessary?
04 Sep 2003 by Brad Hurley
Okay, so metadata are perhaps not as exciting as breakfast cereals, but at some point you have probably had to come up with a list of keywords to describe a Web page, either your own or a clients. The keywords, separated by commas, are placed inside meta tags to help get your site recognized by search engines when someone does a search using those particular words.
Most professional sites, including SVN and 37signals.com, have these keywords. Companies exist whose sole purpose is to sell you services and software to come up with effective keywords. But how important are keywords today? The most popular search engine, Google, reportedly ignores keywords in the meta tags and searches text within the page content instead. And Google powers the second-most and fourth-most popular search engines, Yahoo and AOL. I havent been able to find out the extent to which MSNs search engine factors keywords into its site rankings; if they play an important role that might be a reason to keep putting keywords on your pages. Otherwise, if all the above is accurate, why bother?
Coming up with effective keywords can be a time-consuming task. I know because I get asked to do it frequently. Is the potential payoff worth the expense? Im skeptical. In the meantime, though, Im still doing keywords, and Ive found some useful guidelines here. Basically your keywords will be more effective if they are phrases rather than single words, and you should avoid common single words such as success or results that are likely to be used on thousands of other sites.
16 comments so far (Post a Comment)
04 Sep 2003 | RS said...
I remember reading that Google cares about keywords that correspond to words in weighty elements like , s, etc. Which means - put those keywords in your content, and then point them out in your meta tags.
I haven't seen real data on this tho.
04 Sep 2003 | JF said...
I've found that it's the TITLE tag that does wonders for Google ranking.
04 Sep 2003 | JoeM said...
Yes, I believe keywords will soon be a figment of the old-Internet days . . . this is the best, simplest advice I've seen on the SEO bit:
Be sure that your important pages have a lot of text, usually at least 250 words or more. However, having a few pages with less text and some pages with more is good. Each page should target two or three keywords -- and pages with similar keywords should be linked. Be sure that the title for each page includes the keywords. Put the key words in the filename. Put the key words in the ALT tags for images. Put the key words in the text used for incoming links. (Never have "Click here" as the text in a link.) And put the key words in the page description.
04 Sep 2003 | JG said...
I have to agree w/ JF that the Title tag is the most important on page factor for Google. However, on page criteria really doesn't matter as much as it used to in Google. Incoming anchor text will always beat on page techniques, hands down. With your Keywords tag, I would suggest NEVER including any words that don't actually appear on the page.
As for MSN, it is powered by Inktomi which currently still uses the Keywords tag when determining relevancy. However, the tag will never be as powerful as it was in the late 90's. I wouldn't be surpised if Yahoo! reduces the weight the Keywords tag is given when they roll-out Inktomi results in the Yahoo! SERPS in the coming months.
04 Sep 2003 | Martin Mes said...
Kill the META KEYWORDS that is...
04 Sep 2003 | Brad Hurley said...
Probably the reason many people still spend time and money on developing keywords for meta tags can be traced to "SOP rot," the persistence of outdated standard operating procedures (SOPs). Especially in big companies and organizations, people tend to blindly follow procedures because "that's the way it's done," without questioning whether it's actually still necessary. SOP rot may also explain why some clients still insist that their sites display properly in Netscape 4.
04 Sep 2003 | Wilson Miner said...
It seems to be much more effective to focus on getting the relevant content close to the top of the page. If you've can structure your content appropriately, google and the rest will find your page based on its content, not a hand-made list of keywords, which is really the way it ought to work anyway.
05 Sep 2003 | note said...
google doesn't power yahoo. overture does (now owned by yahoo).
05 Sep 2003 | Pet Supply Online said...
I agree, the TITLE tag seems pretty heavily weighted in google. Good content is the main thing, however. Too many people think they can just bomb the engines without content, and no user will actually be looking for you them ;)
05 Sep 2003 | Huh? said...
Note said: "Google doesn't power Yahoo. Overture does (now owned by Yahoo)."
Did I miss something? Do a search on Yahoo; at the very bottom of the page you'll see "Search Technology provided by Google."
07 Sep 2003 | Brad Pineau said...
Yes, the TITLE tag is very important... especially having the title worded as a phrase that someone would search for in a search engine..
07 Sep 2003 | Julie said...
I'm not saying it's good SOP (because I don't really think it is -- entering meta keywords on every page adds a significant amount of production time overall) but wanted to point out that the reason some companies still bother with entering this info is because their own internal search engines use it. I say they're better off spending the time/resources to improve the search (or to buy Google's technology).
08 Sep 2003 | alisha said...
Especially in big companies and organizations, people tend to blindly follow procedures because "that's the way it's done," without questioning whether it's actually still necessary.
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thank you! clients are always so focused on meta-tags and refuse to listen to the developersadvice that meta-tags are not as important as they used to be. always these long discussions about meta-tags! with google and yahoo taking up almost 80% of the german market - whats the point?
04 Dec 2003 | Fayed said...
Did you see this new tool that helps you predict mispellings and mistypings of keywords:
What do you think?
09 Jan 2005 | inzest storie said...
inzest storie http://inzest-storie.inc-diary.com/
