TL;DR
Google does not use the keywords meta tag when it comes to ranking web search results, disregarding any website owners attempts to increase their ranking. Google does support other meta tags, such as the description meta tag, which is sometimes used as the text for their search results snippets, but does not affect the ranking process. Google is unlikely to use the keywords meta tag in the future, as they have no current plans to change that policy. However, webmasters can use the keywords meta tag for other use cases such as an internal keyword tagging system, and can spy on competitors with certain tools to uncover seed keywords. Lastly, BloggerAI can be used to craft SEO-friendly content without manual effort and rank better on search engines.
Does Google Use Meta Keywords?
When it comes to ranking web search results, Google does not use the keywords meta tag. Despite some website owners attempting to increase their ranking by adding their company name to their keywords meta tag, Google ignores the keywords meta tag in web search.
What Meta Tags Does Google Use?
Google does support several other meta tags. For example, Google sometimes uses the description meta tag as the text for their search results snippets. This usage of the description meta tag doesn’t affect the ranking process.
Will Google Use the Keywords Meta Tag in the Future?
It is possible for Google to use the keywords meta tag in the future, though it is unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years, and has no current plans to change that policy. Google does offer the Google Search Appliance, which has the ability to match meta tags, including the keywords meta tag. However, this is a separate enterprise search appliance from the main web search.
Meta Keywords Possible Use Cases
Using an internal keyword tagging system 🔑 is a great way to stay organized and consistent with your SEO efforts. By adding meta keywords 🔎 to each page, you can easily check whether you’ve already targeted a keyword in the future. To do this, simply set the tag as your target keyword on each page. For example, if our page’s target keyword was “content marketing”, it’d look like this:
There are several advantages to doing this:
- Avoid keyword cannibalization. If you have multiple pages targeting the same keyword, you can end up competing against yourself and inadvertently hurting your own rankings.
- Prevent overlapping work. In an enterprise SEO environment, there are likely to be multiple teams working on similar tasks. Having an internal keyword tagging system can help ensure that everybody is targeting distinct keywords.
- Identify collaboration opportunities. If you notice that you’re not ranking well for one of your keywords, you may want to collaborate with another team to improve your content.
It’s worth noting, however, that there is one potential downside to using the meta keywords tag for this purpose, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
According to Bill Slawski’s recent Twitter poll, it’s been proven that approximately one-third of people still make use of the keywords meta tag. Therefore, you can employ your rivals’ meta tags to uncover ‘seed keywords’ for your keyword research. Just search for the keywords meta tag on your competitors’ homepages.
For example, here’s the keywords meta tag from a popular shoe store’s homepage:
Online, there are a lot of different tools that can easily set up keyword spying, such as SpyFu, Moz, Ahrefs, SerpStat and SEMrush. By using these tools, you need to be careful not to be spied on and to use them to find out what keywords your competitors are using.
Introducing BloggerAI
Writing high-quality blog posts can be a time-consuming task. With BloggerAI though, you can craft engaging and SEO-friendly content without the need for manual effort. This AI-powered blog posts editor helps you create content that ranks better on search engines and gets more clicks, saving you time and effort.
References
Everything is written and taken from the official Google release page.