There has always been a huge confusion on whether or not meta keywords are necessary for search engine ranking. Is using them feasible or not? Let’s take a look on the practicality why it was in use in the first place and why it might not make any sense at present.
There was a time when adding a lot of keyword (stuffing) phrases was the key factor to compete with other websites. The more you would stuff it the more it was likely to rank better. So, what most firm would do was to fill in much as possible. The downside? There was no competition since stuffed pages remained in the winning position. Sites that actually had good contents weren’t viewed that often and that seemed like a poor judgment from the viewpoint of the search engines themselves. Moreover, even the readers would lose interest too soon if they would be still bound to view only those websites that could probably contain only poor stuff.
There came a time when search engine algorithms eventually started prioritizing the quality of the contents. When the insides are good people would stay on a web page for longer and that should decide whether a site deserves to be on the top. It soon became a ranking factor. It had to be. It still is and will be!
The site owners had played lots of tricks in the meantime. The most popular one was to keep the phrases hidden. That is, to keep the good contents that were visible by the end users, use limited phrases there, but also use the same color code for the font as well as for the background so that the intended phrases are only noticed by the web crawlers or bots. We call it Black Hat SEO. There was a high time that the algorithms needed to evolve so that those working in the back-end don’t even try to play tricks.
But, does that mean that keywords don’t matter at all? If that was true then all site owners must have hired English literature experts by now to write for them. Obviously, that could not be true! The technical side is equally important as is the writing style to hypnotize your visitors. Keywords play an additional role in this. If your contents are mind-boggling and you followed the actual count of focus keyword and other related keywords in your website or blog nobody can really stop you from reaching the top. Though it takes at least two to three months to meet that mark if followed with consistency.
The keywords in the Meta tag are preferred to be limited to a few rather than writing every single thing that comes to your mind that most site operators would do a decade back. Most SEO experts claim that it no longer serves as a ranking factor by the search engines like Google and Yahoo! Bing basically checks whether or not it contains spam, yet doesn’t help in keeping a web page to the top. So, beware if you have ever written even a slightest of irrelevant phrase. It would affect you negatively.
Google never officially shares its search algorithms, and that is true for other search engines as well. What makes others understand is trial and error methods. They try something and check whether they have done the right thing and where does it stand for a particular time frame. They compare with their current status with their previous one as well as with other competitors about what might have worked and vice versa.
There are (very few) sites that have not followed the mainstream meta keywords strategies and still rank better than countless other web pages who did. There has to be some reason why is that. The website owners do not want to take risks, and so, they follow both ways. They no longer stuff keywords both front-end and back-end. Additionally, they also take note of what phrases ought to be there in the main heading plus in the inside contents. The meta keywords may not help in the ranking, nevertheless search engine robots do observe whether a site contains real or spam phrases.