Why are people still using (meta) keywords?

So, how do you know when a particular industry is evolving into maturity? When things become obsolete.

Yes, just like our own bodies, the web is aging – and the way things are ranked is no exception.

This very short, very insightful video straight from Google is what I’m talking about – something that internet marketers have known for many years – that keyword meta tags are completely useless for marketing.

Why? Because it allows you to cheat. And Google doesn’t like that. Heck, no one does.

Let’s say you had a website that is selling shoes, flowers, anything – and you put the ‘sex, sex drive, …” anything to do with sex, basically – in the meta tag keywords code of your web pages.

<meta name="keywords" content="sex, sex drive, etc..." />

Basically, this was used long ago in the original development stages of the web to ‘mark’ pages so they could be searched. But it also allows people to falsely mark pages for relevance, so search engines like Google no longer follow it.

How you can see the meta tags on pages

Do a right click and View Source on any page. You might have to work a while to find pages that use it still, since it’s phasing out…

What you’re looking for is the code above.

Check out this video on YouTube.com for more information. It’s a quick view, and will save you time developing your website: