Are Meta Keywords Obsolete?

Question

Creating a website for a BraodBand Company, and not too sure whether or not to go ahead and fill in the meta keywords? Are they still necessary?

Answer 1

They will still help as long as you use them responsibly.

Answer 2

They certainly don't hurt, but I'd make sure you generate unique and fitting keywords for each page if possible. The meta descriptions is more important, though, as Google tends to use it as the snippet they show in results.

Answer 3

I've stopped using meta keywords. Google tends to look elsewhere (like in the actual page's content) as do other search engines. As stated above, the description is important as Google uses it - If you don't use it then Google will normally take the topmost paragraph/heading of your page for its description.

Using meta keywords can hurt if you don't know how to use them. #1 rule - don't have a meta keyword which doesn't exist somewhere in the actual page!

Answer 4

Not nearly as important as they once were, Keywords are the sort of phrases that I’d expect someone to type into a search engine to find this web site. You can probably leave this out these days, but I'd put a few in as it can’t hurt. The fact is that, now, the spiders can work out for themselves what keywords are relevant to your page text so the meta keywords code is somewhat obsolete.

So, meta tags are just about obsolete in terms of Search Engine Optimization. But consider these three points:

1. Write high quality description tags designed to get a user to click on your link, yet is still relevant to the topic of the page
2. Make them unique per page.
3. Don't spam your meta tags. It won't work and you'll just get in trouble because of it.