Google recently announced on their Webmaster Central blog that they no longer use the keywords meta tag. Big news? Not necessarily. In fact, Google had apparently not been using keywords for quite some time and had only recently made the public statement about it. That being said, I do find it interesting because this again stresses the importance of keyword-rich page content.

Keep in mind that other search engines still use the keywords meta tag in the HTML code, so this by no means indicates that you should stop using keywords. Instead, use this as a reminder of how important it is to review your page content along with your image ALT values, page titles, heading text, etc. to be sure you are maximizing your efforts to get the best return.

This also raises the question…if Google has dropped the use of this meta tag (for now), will others follow? Bing hasn’t really indicated either way, but they do make it clear that the keywords meta tag is not “the panacea it once was”.

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