What is the meta keywords tag?
The meta keywords tag is a line in a page's HTML head that lists words the author thinks the page is about: <meta name="keywords" content="...">. In the 1990s search engines read it directly, which made it the easiest ranking lever on the web and therefore the most abused. Pages stuffed the tag with hundreds of terms, including their competitors' names and words that had nothing to do with the content. By the early 2000s the major engines had stopped trusting it, and in 2009 Google confirmed it does not use the tag for ranking at all.
It still exists. Content management systems still have the field, SEO plugins still offer it and some sites still fill it in, out of habit. On a modern site it is a vestigial organ: present, harmless, doing nothing.
Why it matters
Why the meta keywords tag matters
Mostly as a lesson. Its history explains how modern search works: any signal that site owners fully control and that costs nothing to fake will be gamed until engines stop reading it. That is why ranking now leans on links, behavior and content quality, which are harder to counterfeit. It also matters as a small hygiene point. A keywords tag is visible in the source to anyone, including competitors, and a long list of terms tells them exactly what you are targeting.
The one remaining practical use is internal. Some site search tools and a few smaller engines still read it, and a brief, honest tag does no harm there. Outside that, it is a field to ignore.
In practice
How the meta keywords tag works in practice
- 01
If your platform has the field, you can leave it empty. Nothing is lost. If you choose to use it for an internal search engine, keep it to a handful of genuinely relevant terms per page and never repeat the same list across the site. Do not spend time on it that could go to the tags that still count: the title tag, the meta description, the headings and the page content itself.
- 02
Treat it as a diagnostic when you inherit a site. A keywords tag stuffed with dozens of terms is a sign that the rest of the SEO was done in the same spirit, and worth a closer look at the links, the hidden text and the content. The same goes for pages built from an old template, where a decade-old keyword list travels with every new page.
Watch out
What people get wrong about meta keywords
Believing it still works. It has not affected Google rankings in well over a decade, and anyone selling meta keyword optimization is selling nothing. The other mistake is treating "ignored" as "harmful": a short tag will not hurt you, it just will not help.
The real cost is attention. Every hour spent on the keywords tag is an hour not spent on a title or a page that could move, and on most sites there are dozens of those waiting.
