Stoney deGeyter over at Search Engine Guide wrote the other day about everything you need to know about the Keywords Meta tag. To summarise: a big fat zero!
I believe that is a little unfair.
Michael Martinez in his article "Meta tags DO matter – get it right for a change" states "The keywords meta tag DOES influence rankings for Yahoo! and Ask. Anyone can test this. Just stick a unique expression in your keywords meta tag and watch your page rank for that expression on those search engines.."
I believe the Meta Keywords tag can be useful for optimising your site both for external and internal search. This tag can provide search engines with useful information about the content of your web page. We can debate the value for external search until we are blue in the face, but today I want to focus on its importance for internal search.
Many if not most sites these days have an internal search engine. And many of these internal search engines can use the Meta Keywords tag as a source of content for making search results more meaningful to the searcher.
True many if not most of the major search engines ignore this tag when deciding the relevance of a site, page etc to return in their search results, but don’t forget the importance of your internal search engine optimisation.
The use of alternative spellings, plurals, misspellings, and terminology which is relevant to the content on the page but is not necessarily found on the page can assist your internal search engine to return more meaningful results.
So think about how you might use this tag to optimise your internal search.
Something to ponder…..
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