Are meta keywords still relevant?

Search engines have come a long way in recent years, and while changes to search algorithms (what the engines operate on) may go completely unnoticed by the average user, they sometimes really shake up the world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is the name given to the process of optimising a website to achieve higher rankings on search engines, and is so necessary for a website that an entire industry exists to provide the service. It's important to keep up-to-date on SEO if you own a website or work on them, as it will often be the difference between a site's success and failure.

Going back some years now, before "Web 2.0" and the explosion of online blogging, collaboration, and networking, optimising a website relied almost exclusively on keywords - not just important words, but the 'meta tag.' This meta tag is placed near the top of the web page, and is invisible to anyone viewing the page in the normal fashion. Using the meta tag which looks like <meta name="keywords" content="enter your keywords here">, the idea is to place your best keywords into it, building up a long list of words that a search engine will associate with your page. This would probably be repeated on every page of your website, essentially stuffing them full of keywords. The problem with this however, is that not everyone can be trusted to use the system correctly. Problems with the tag arose when some webmasters (a person in charge of a website) were found to be including keywords that were not at all relevant to the page content, effectively misleading the search engines, and appearing in the results of searches for popular keywords, while being relevant to none of them. This increased the popularity of their website, for they were receiving a lot of visits for these popular keywords, but visitors would find little value in their site, and it may have included some form of advertisement or self-promotion.

The exploitation of this 'weakness' in the system took a sinister turn when some individuals used harmless keywords to lure people to view their site that contained "potentially offensive material." This became such an issue in America that the act of luring minors to a potentially offensive website by the use of misleading keywords was made punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Needless to say, search engines soon dropped the value they placed on meta keywords. As of writing this article, the popular search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing handle meta keywords differently. Google has ignored them completely, while Bing and Yahoo do take them into account. Still, they receive little of the importance that they once did, as is evident by the following quotations from the companies.

Yahoo provided the following statement, here shortened:

What changed with Yahoo’s ranking algorithms is that while we still index the meta keyword tag, the ranking importance given to meta keyword tags receives the lowest ranking signal in our system...

- Yahoo

You can find the article, including the full quote here.

Duane Forrester, Bing's Senior Product Manager, has also provided a statement on how Bing uses meta keywords:

"I'll make this statement: meta keywords is a signal. One of roughly a thousand we analyze. Getting it right is a nice perk for us, but won't rock your world. Abusing meta keywords can hurt you."

- Duane Forrester, Bing

In conclusion, meta keywords can still be implemented, but they must be used correctly. Using either too many keywords, or keywords unrelated to the page content will invoke penalisation from the search engines, and it would have been better if you hadn't included any. This is just the way it should be. The implementation of meta keywords by webmasters and SEO professionals must be regulated to keep it fair and correct. By all means, do experiment with keywords, but stay smart about it, and constantly evaluate the keywords that you're implementing.

My meta keyword checklist:

Do the keywords already exist on the page? If so, they're of no value also appearing as meta keywords.
Are the keywords relevant enough to the page to warrant inclusion, but not relevant enough to appear in the title, description, or any of the various heading tags where they will receive more priority? If so, go ahead and use them.
If someone found your page by its meta keywords alone, would the page content be of any value to them? It should be valuable to the majority of people in this case.
And finally, am I getting carried away? It's easy to, trust me. If you feel that you're building up quite a list of keywords, go over them all and compare them against one another. You'll probably find that some aren't actually that useful.