Canadian Marketing Blog

Surprise

Not many things surprise me after so many years in this business, but I have to admit, this did:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Since starting my own creative consultancy two years ago, I've written many websites for clients who think that key words actually matter. So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in their web search ranking. Obviously this isn't as earth-shattering as learning that cigarettes are bad for you or that Balloon Boy was a hoax, but it does raise an eyebrow given that Google hasn't exactly advertised this news. Thoughts?

Google doesn't use meta tags for search for some years now. I am not sure whether they announced this but it is a well known fact among the online marketers.

Google picks the words from the description of the websites and rank website by the number of clicks it gets, which I think is a better way to get relevant websites higher in a search.

That doesn't mean that Google doesn't pay great attention to keywords.

The keywords meta tag can be included in the HTML for any web page. Google doesn't pay attention to it BUT it most definitely pays attention to keywords in title tags, headlines, subheadings, linking text and much more.

Keyword are the words people use when they search and therefore they should be of great interest to marketers. They are a 'window' into seeing what customers are looking for. Good keyword research is simply good market research.

the reason that Google has stopped using keywords is that the keywords do not appear on page, they appear in the source code and users don't often read code. therefore in an effort to deliver the most relevant information as it relates to te user experience they are giving greater weight to the items user can see... good SEO is all about the user's point of view not what the bots crawl. (hope that helps)