Should You Use Meta Keywords?

What Exactly Are Meta Keywords?

Meta keywords are a meta> tag option that can provide search engines with more information about the content of a page.
This tag is placed in your website’s head> section. And it appears to be as follows:
href=”keywords” content=”Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3″>
Google’s ranking system does not include meta keywords.
As a result, you are not required to employ them on your website in order to rank higher in Google.

Are Meta Keywords Used by Other Search Engines?

Let’s see if other search engines, such as Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and Naver, employ meta keywords.

Bing

Christi Olsen of Microsoft tweeted in 2020 that Bing does not employ meta keywords. They also exclude and ignore them:

Yandex

Yandex is Russia’s second-largest search engine, with a roughly 35% market share. According to Yandex’s help page, the meta keywords element “may be considered when calculating the page’s relevance to search queries.”
So, if you optimise your webpages for Yandex search, using meta keywords is likely to enhance your rankings.

Naver

After Google, Naver is South Korea’s second-largest search engine. Naver, like Google, includes documentation on how to optimise webpages for Naver Search.
And, while they contain information about which meta tags to include on your pages, the manual makes no mention of meta keywords tags. As a result, it is plausible to believe that meta tags have no discernable significance for Naver.

Using Meta Keywords for Competitive Analysis

Some people recommend using meta keywords to conduct competitive research.
They recommend examining the meta keywords on competitor sites to determine which keywords they are attempting to optimise for.
However, we believe that this is rarely the best method.

This is due to the fact that:

Because most websites no longer employ meta keywords tags, you won’t find any keywords there most of the time.
Some websites even include irrelevant or trash keywords in their meta tag fields.

Using a professional competitor research tool is a better way to conduct competition research.
Similar to Semrush’s Organic Research tool.
Simply enter your competitor’s website or a specific page into the tool and press “Search.”

Use Other Tags Instead

The meta keywords tag is unimportant in terms of search engine rankings.
As a result, you should concentrate on other tags. Title tags and meta description tags, for example (which are known to have some direct or indirect SEO value).

Title Tag

In search results, the title tag shows as the title of your page.

Please keep in mind that Google does not always use title tags to build titles in search results. It occasionally rewrites your titles to meet a user’s search query. More information regarding this update may be found here.
Title tags are frequently the primary piece of information that users use to pick which search results to click on.

Here’s some guidance on how to create ideal title tags for your sites.

Keep your titles around 60 characters long — Google truncates titles that are longer than 60 characters.
Use your principal keyword – Google uses keywords in titles to determine what topic the website covers.
Add click-worthy modifiers like “best,” “highest,” or the current year. This can increase your CTR (click-through rate).

Know everything about META TAGS: Especially for SEO

Meta Description

The meta description appears as the descriptive snippet of your page in search results.

Note: Google doesn’t always display the meta description specified in the HTML code. Sometimes, it overrides and generates a description it thinks users will find more relevant to the searched query.

Meta descriptions aren’t a direct ranking factor. But writing a compelling meta description can improve your CTR.

Here are some suggestions to consider while writing your meta descriptions:

Keep your meta descriptions within 120 characters – Google truncates meta descriptions that exceed 120 characters.
Include your keyword – Google highlights words and phrases in the meta description that match the search query.
Write something clickable, not clickbait – accurately summarise the page’s contents.

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