This post might not make sense to you if you have not attended my last few batches of IEBC or totally not familiar of Search Engine Optimization. Regardless, it is still important to stay current with the updates released especially by Google.

What are Meta Keywords?

To add a bit of background to this post, Meta Keywords are tags Webmasters add to a web page. In Joomla, we can simply insert these words in the Article Manager whenever we write new articles (or update existing ones).

In the past, Search Engines put a strong emphasis on Meta keywords for ranking but it comes to a point where webmasters start to abuse this tag and stuff a lot of keywords  to artificially increase the ranking for their web sites. Hence, Search Engines have no choice but to modify their ranking formula to work around this flaw.

Until recently, there is still a lot of discussion around the world on whether if Search Engines have totally eliminated Meta keywords in their ranking algorithm. To put an end to this guessing, Google released a video on this.

No more Meta Keywords

As mentioned by Matt Cutts (the head of Google Web Spam team) in the following video. Google does not consider the Meta Keywords in any part of their 200-factors formula at the moment.

Meta Description still counts

Although Meta keywords has lost its importance for  SEO, the Meta description is still a consideration whenever Google displays your web page for Searchers to click. Based on my experience, it is important for you to put some attractive description of your page content in the Meta description. This will also increase the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) to your web pages from the Search Engines.

How about the other Search Engines?

So what about Yahoo and the new Bing from microsoft? Although there are no official release from these two sources, I can say that Meta Keywords is getting less and less important when it comes to  Search Engine optimization.

In summary, I would still suggest you to include at least one or two highly targeted kywords into Meta keywords tag (just for other Search Engines) and move on. Do not spend a great deal of your time on this tag.

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments =)