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Ah, the meta keywords tag...

I'm surprised to see how many webmasters, still to this day, stuff dozens (and more) keywords into the meta tag in hopes of delivering visitors to a site. Surely, they know by now that this only hurts the chances of qualified visitors finding their site on the search engines.

It is debatable whether the meta keywords tag should be used at all anymore. Google reportedly no longer uses the meta keywords tag in determining a site's ranking. Yahoo does still use the meta keywords tag; albeit reportedly places little weight on it.

Search engines used to rely heavily on the meta keywords tag in an attempt to determine which keywords were relevant to a web page. Unfortunately, this practice eventually lead to the misuse of the tag. The sophisticated search engines of today are able to examine the actual keywords in the body of a web page--rendering the keyword meta tag much less significant.

The risks associated with using the meta keywords tag may out way the benefits.

Risks

• Using keywords that are not relevant to (or not used in the content of) your web page can decrease your rankings in the major search engines
• Your competitors can easily view your targeted keywords and use them to build a competitive SEO or PPC campaign against you

Benefit

• A small advantage in positioning with some of the major search engines

Should you use it or loose it? You decide...

Mary E. Archer is president and founder of Strategic Ranking LLC, a national search engine marketing consulting company based in Richmond, Virginia. Learn more about Strategic Ranking's search engine optimization, search advertising and news search engine promotion solutions at http://www.strategic-ranking.com