The nefarious keyword tag has created more confusion and stress in webmasters and SEOs alike than any other meta tag. Endless questions of who supports it, who doesn’t, how many keywords should I use, do I use commas or not, and thousands more are asked on webmaster forums every single day. There have been a great many wonderful articles written to clear up these questions but they still get asked.
I’m not going to bother writing yet another of those articles. Personally I HATE this tag. Not because of the tag itself, its really nice and non-offensive. No I hate it because of all the inane questions, bad information, and scammy tactics that are the results of this tag. If your wanting some information on the current state of the tag here are 3 wonderful examples if your wondering.
Here is Matt Cutts from Google saying that “Google doesn’t use the keyword meta tag in web search”
What’s The Best Keyword Meta Tags Formula? by Shaun Anderson (hobo)
Even Yahoo, who supported the tag much longer than anyone else are dropping support (or are they?).
So with no search engines of note using the keyword meta tag to influence rankings anymore what should we do with it? The easy answer is to forget all about it. In large part that is what I have done on a lot of our sites and the sites we manage. So far we haven’t noticed any negative effects at all.
But, there is one use that I will highly recommend for the keyword meta tag. Misspellings.
Currently Yahoo and most likely the others as well are indexing the keyword meta tag as normal text with a really low ranking factor. Because of this I would recommend using the keywords tag for common misspellings of your business name, product name, or anything else that you would rank for normally. Since you wouldn’t want to use the misspellings on your page hiding them in the keyword tag allows the search engines to relate the misseplling to your page.
Either that or just forget about them. Thats what I do.