Meta keywords

Definition

Meta keywords are HTML attributes that can be added to a webpage's code to indicate the keywords that are relevant to the page's content. They are typically used by search engines to help determine the relevance of a page to a particular search query.

Brief history

In the early days of search engines, meta keywords were used as a way for website owners to indicate to search engines the keywords that were relevant to their content. This allowed search engines to better understand the content of a webpage and improve the accuracy of their search results.

However, this system was open to abuse. Some website owners would stuff their meta keywords with a large number of irrelevant or low-quality keywords in an attempt to rank higher in the search results. This led to search engines giving less weight to meta keywords in their ranking algorithms, and eventually ignoring them altogether.

Meta keywords today

Today, most search engines, including Google, do not use meta keywords as a ranking factor[1]. Instead, they rely on other signals, such as the content of the webpage, the relevance of the webpage's links, and the overall quality of the website, to determine its ranking in the search results.

As a result, it is generally not necessary to include meta keywords on your website, and doing so is unlikely to have any impact on your search rankings. Instead, you should focus on other aspects of on-page SEO, such as the page's content and title tag, to help improve its ranking in the search results.