{"id":60966,"date":"2011-10-20T11:30:48","date_gmt":"2011-10-20T15:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wpmu.org\/?p=60966"},"modified":"2011-10-20T07:08:15","modified_gmt":"2011-10-20T11:08:15","slug":"wordpress-seo-tip-forget-the-meta-keywords-tag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wordpress-seo-tip-forget-the-meta-keywords-tag\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress SEO Tip: Forget The Meta Keywords Tag"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’re looking at ways to improve the search engine ranking of your WordPress site, one consideration that you can safely forget about is the meta keywords tag.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The keywords tag can be included in the metadata of a HTML document, which provides information about your web page to browsers and search engines.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

This is an example of the meta keywords tag, on a web page about low-fat burger recipes.<\/em><\/p>\n

Used and abused<\/h2>\n

In the old days, back when the web was a dark and lawless place, search engines and web browsers relied much more heavily on meta tags than they do now.<\/p>\n

\"Are<\/a>
Once upon a time, keywords were king<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the mid-1990s, early search engines like AltaVista made heavy use of the meta keyword tag to rank and categorize web pages.<\/p>\n

Webmasters saw this as a golden opportunity for keyword-stuffing and spam, and the keywords meta tag quickly became one of the most abused HTML elements of all time.<\/p>\n

The result? Most search engines recognized the unreliability of the meta keywords tag, and slowly removed it from their ranking factors<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

In terms of SEO, the meta keywords tag is dead and buried<\/h2>\n

This is the simple truth about the meta keyword tag today: Google and most other search engines pay no attention to it.<\/strong> For at least the last few years, but probably stretching back over a decade, Google has not considered the meta keywords tag in its search ranking algorithm.<\/p>\n

Straight from the horse’s mouth:<\/strong> This is a video of Matt Cutts in 2009, explaining Google’s official position on the meta keywords tag. Matt is a senior engineer at Google and the head of their Webspam team, so if he tells you something about SEO it’s most likely the truth.<\/p>\n

jK7IPbnmvVU<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

If anyone tells you that the meta keywords tag is still important to your SERP rankings, you should have serious reservations about that person’s SEO credibility.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Meta keywords for WordPress? Don’t bother<\/h2>\n

A standard WordPress installation doesn’t include the meta keywords tag – you have to add it yourself. Unless you have a specific reason for using meta keywords on your site, you’re better off leaving them out.<\/p>\n

Meta keywords carry no SEO value at all, and bloating your WordPress site with unnecessary code will only slow down your page loading times.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you want to learn more about how keywords relate to your SEO, we’ve got a couple of articles here<\/a> and here<\/a> that should point you in the right direction.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Mia<\/a> for the feature picture.<\/em><\/sub><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The meta keywords tag has no SEO value at all, and you’re generally better off not using it on your WordPress site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7007,"featured_media":60987,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"blog_reading_time":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_tutorials_categories":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[235],"tags":[35],"tutorials_categories":[],"class_list":["post-60966","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-misc","tag-seo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7007"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60966"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204459,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60966\/revisions\/204459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60966"},{"taxonomy":"tutorials_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tutorials_categories?post=60966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}