Do META Keywords Help SEO?

Posted: May 28 in Medical Marketing tagged seo web design by Ines

There was a time when search engine optimization website design involved stuffing keywords into the META tag of the HTML code, and medical websites were no exception. While some web design and SEO firms still claim to use META keywords to vault your website to the top of the rankings, this method of trying to trick the robots simply doesn’t work. In fact, Matt Cutts of Google has stated in the Google blog that, “Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.” This SEO technique went out the window long ago, yet it still remains the topic of debate among SEO experts.

Why Shun the META Keywords
Basically, Google realized that even the most honest professional website designers and website design firms were relying too heavily on keywords stuffed in between the META tags. Worse, black hat SEO web design companies were stuffing the META tags with keywords that had little or nothing to do with the website itself. So if you were working hard to promote your medical website, someone with little ethics could capitalize on your keywords to direct search results toward his or her page, even if that page had nothing to do with the medical field. Google, along with the other large search engines, realized that it was easier to just ignore these keywords rather than try to figure out if they were related to the page or not.

Good Web Design for SEO
If META keywords are useless, what can help your site move up in search listings? Good SEO copywriting will help tremendously because it tells Google what the content on the website is about. The better it’s written, the more people will want to link to it, thus moving it up the results page.

Keep in mind, though, that just because the META keywords are ignored doesn’t mean the entire META tag is worthless. Google and others still weigh the META description to a certain degree, so having an SEO website designer who understands how to create a good, accurate description can still help achieve the desired ranking.