Website Design Principles 2025

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SEO Myth: Meta tag keywords

20th August, 2011

Today I decided to create a new category on our blog titled ‘SEO Myth’; each post will touch base on an SEO related statement, the kind that should raise alarm bells for you and your business! Over the next few months I aim to post lots of these SEO Myth’s to help teach / explain the SEO process.

The first SEO statement you don’t want to hear:

“We can help you optimise your website by improving your meta keywords”

Google’s Matt Cutts posted on his blog sometime ago:

“…We wanted to debunk that misconception, at least as it regards to Google. Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.”

So… If Google does not use ‘meta tag keywords’ to help calculate SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and you hear “We can help you optimise your website by improving your meta keywords” then what should you do? You guessed it, tell them not to waste your time! When it comes to marketing your business online, money and time would be better spent developing other key areas within your website. Changing your meta keywords tag won’t make your website rank higher.

Please don’t get meta keywords mixed up with meta descriptions and page titles, after all, Google doesn’t disregard all meta tags! To help improve your clickthrough rate and lower your bounce rate, meta descriptions and titles should all be unique, relevant, and truly represent the content on a page.

If you have any thoughts or feedback on meta tag keywords or SEO then please feel free to post them below, as always it is great to hear from our awesome blog readers… Until next time, keep it Tidy!

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