Whilst presenting to Warwick Business School on Friday I made the usual comment regards META Keywords within an HTML page. Two delegates made comment to suggest that I was incorrect, 1 a startup business who proposed the idea that we may not fully know what factors Google use to rank a page, which is a good argument and the 2nd an ex-director of an IT company who was unconvinced. The fact that spending hours writing out the relevant keywords for the web developer actually adds no value to the page in the eyes of Google. This may be new to some of you but in relation to Google they haven’t used this part of the web page for a good number of years. If your interested watch Matt Cutts from Google explain why.
Why don’t they take any notice?
Effectively it’s to reduce SPAM levels and remove pages that provide non-value add irrelevant content. Choosing keywords for your web page is another factor. You need to identify the keywords that relate to content on the page, and more so keywords that would be used by your potential user when trying to locate your products /services.
Should you include them, well some of the other search engines will use them and it will assist when reviewing the page as to what the content is meant to refer to.
For those of you who don’t know where the META keyword tag is located it’s fairly simple to locate. To see this in your page you need to review the source of the page. You can do this by navigating to your website (or some one else’s) and then right clicking on the page and selecting Review Source from the right click menu. If the website your viewing doesn’t allow you to do this then I would suggest you locate the menu within the browser and access from there. Some people prevent a right mouse click to stop people looking at the source and locating the paths for images.
If your web developer insists that your doing this activity for improved SEO and page position in Google I’d suggest you point him to the multitude of pages on the internet from Google relating to the issue.
