Posted on June 8, 2010 in First Principles, SEO and Internet Marketing

There's a common misconception that an important part of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is to place 'Keyword Meta Tags' into the site code.

Comments I get often sound like: 'I want to appear in Google for "Exclusive Widgets" and someone told me that you should put in a meta keyword tag to make that happen'.

The truth is that while we're happy to embed meta keywords in the code if that's what you want, Google and other search engines place no relevance on meta keywords.

It won't hurt, but it's not going to help either.

Google itself explains that it stopped paying attention to the keyword meta tag several years ago as it was often abused by spammers who wanted to stuff irrelevant words into their site.

See this video by Matt Cutts, Google Search Engineer, and the information on Google's webmaster blog.

Luckily, there are lots of other things that we can do that will help.

Google is now much more interested in the written content of your site. Adding your desired key words to your page content, in headings, paragraph text, the menu items, even the alternative text for images - all these places help Google to know what your site is about.

Your site content is your biggest asset.

Even then, if two sites have similar content, Google has to decide which one should appear first. Another factor that helps is how many other sites on the internet link back to yours. If a site has more links, Google assumes that this popularity means it is more worthy of appearing on top of the list.

It then gets a whole lot more complicated, and no-one can guarantee a specific placement in Google, but there are a whole lot of options that can help. Get in touch and I'll be happy to talk over the possibilities.