As an expert in the field of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), I have been working with various aspects of website optimization for many years. My focus has been on understanding the intricacies of how search engines operate and how to best use that knowledge to improve a website's visibility and ranking. One of the many elements that have been discussed and debated within the SEO community is the use of meta keywords.

Meta keywords are a part of the HTML code of a webpage that was traditionally used to provide search engines with a list of keywords relevant to the content of the page. The idea was to help search engines understand the main themes and topics of the page without having to read the entire content. However, over time, the effectiveness and relevance of meta keywords in influencing search engine rankings have been a subject of change.

Old habits die hard, and for a long time, many webmasters and SEO practitioners would fill the meta keywords tag with a comprehensive list of keywords they believed were relevant to their content. The hope was that by doing so, they could manipulate search engine rankings in their favor. However, as search engine algorithms became more sophisticated, this practice became less effective and eventually was largely disregarded by major search engines.

As of my last update, Google has made it clear that they do not use the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor. This means that even if a website includes a meta keywords tag, it will not impact how well that site ranks in Google's search results. Google's stance is that the content of the page itself, along with other on-page and off-page factors, is a much more reliable indicator of the page's relevance and quality.

On the other hand, Bing has a slightly different approach. While they do not use the meta keywords tag as a primary ranking factor, they have stated that they do look at the tag. This suggests that Bing might take the information provided in the meta keywords tag into account in some way, although it is not clear to what extent or how it might influence rankings.

It's important to note that the use of meta keywords has been largely discredited within the SEO community. Many experts believe that the effort spent on crafting and maintaining a meta keywords tag would be better used elsewhere, such as focusing on creating high-quality, relevant content that naturally incorporates the keywords that users are searching for.

In conclusion, while the meta keywords tag was once thought to be an important aspect of SEO, it has become much less significant over time. Today, creating valuable, keyword-rich content that provides a good user experience is far more important for achieving high search engine rankings.

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Old habits die hard, and spammers will always fill the meta keywords tag with every word they can think of. As far as Google is concerned, you can use the meta keywords tag all you want. It doesn't hurt anything (or so they say). ... Bing actually does look at the tag, but they don't use it as a ranking factor.Mar 19, 2015read more >>