Clicksharp Marketing

If content is the currency in SEO and SEM, then keywords are the loose change. So watch where you throw your loose change; it might be a wishing well.

SEO: content is currency, keywords are the loose change. (Photo by nickwheeleroz)

In line with the previous post about reciprocal linking, there’s another misconception which has led many an armchair SEO astray: the meta keyword tag.

Over time, there’s been a fair amount of debate on whether these are still relevant to search engine rankings. But nowadays, it’s hard to find a single opinion within the SEO community stating that meta tags are important. Come to think of it, the only remotely positive mention came from search engine guru Danny Sullivan, who said that the meta keywords *might* be a good place to stash misspellings of the real keywords you’re shooting for. But even he is very lukewarm in his support of this.

Let’s also make sure we’re using the right verbiage: the notion of a “meta tag” tends to refer to the meta keyword tag. There exists also a meta description tag, and this is in fact a significant criterion in SEO. (More on this in a future post.)

But let’s get back to the traditional meta tag. There was a time when search engines offered webmasters this tag as a way to position their respective website content for keywords which weren’t necessarily shown in the page content. (Example: you sell used cars, your website copy says used cars — you might not write “pre-owned cars” anywhere in the copy, but that’s a perfectly good keyword targeted to your website.)

Alas — it didn’t take long for spammers to start abusing this, and not surprisingly, the search engines caught on.

So nowadays, there is little or no value left in these, at least with respect to the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN). You’re better off focusing on other website markup elements — first and foremost title tags, meta description, H1/H2 tags, image alt tags, anchor text, and so on. Elliance gave us a nice rundown of important SEO criteria not long ago (pay attention to the ones closer to the top).

It’s a big job, this SEO — knowing what not to do is just as important as all the tricks of the trade.

~~~~~

Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 @ 3:08 am on the category SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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