Boo-yah! It’s official. On September 21, 2009 , Google Search Quality Team member Matt Cutts posted that Google does NOT consider the meta keyword tag in their ranking analysis of websites.
Why doesn’t Google use the once-popular meta tag? Matt says:
“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.”
But the keywords tag isn’t the only meta touted by search engine marketers. The meta description tag, the one usually used to put your site’s “elevator pitch” out there for search engines, has long been an old standby for shady search engine marketers. Does it improve your ranking to include a meta description tag that’s keyword optimized?
Here’s what Matt has to say:
“We do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets…
“Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.”
Summary: If you’re being sold Search Engine Optimization and your service provider tries to win you over with tales of first page rankings through keyword optimized meta description and keyword tags, you’re being had. Run like the wind.
So how DO you get real results in your rankings?
Here are five things you can do that really work:
- Title tags
- SEO content
- Inbound links
- Clean code: Make sure your site passes W3C validation
- Hire Aqua Vita Creative to get your site up to snuff
If you’re curious, here’s the link to the original article:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
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