Keywords meta-tag
The keywords meta-tag is quite self-explanatory it allows you to
enter a list of keywords that tell search engines and directories how to
categorise your page; what the main topics of the page content are.
There has been a great deal of debate about the usefulness of the
keywords tag, and exactly how the search engines use this tag, and the
debate isn't helped by the fact that the search engines themselves
change their opinions of the keywords meta-tag fairly often.
In the first, nave, days of the internet, search engines used this
tag religiously to categorise web pages, and connect pages to search
terms. As soon as webmasters realised this, however, they began packing
the keywords meta-tag full of unrelated, but popular, keywords in order
to be found more often. The search engines called this practice search
engine spamming, and penalised it whenever they could identify it. Many
search engines just stopped using the keywords meta-tag altogether.
The problem for search engines is that when the keywords meta-tag is
not abused, it provides a wonderfully simple and accurate way for you,
the web designer, to tell them what topics this page covers. Without it,
the search engines must guess the topics of the page based on the
content of the page, and in advanced cases, the text used to link to
your page. While some of the brightest minds in the industry have put
years of work into making this guess work as accurate as possible, it is
still a case of a computer trying to understand human writing.
It is for this reason that many search engines, including Google,
have begun using the keywords meta-tag again. As with the title
meta-tag, though, the search engines compare the contents of the
keywords meta-tag to the keywords they find in the content, and they'll
rank your page higher if they match, and penalise your page as spam if
they don't.
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