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Meta Keywords

Last updated: Aug 03, 2022

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What is a Meta Keyword?

When we apply SEO to a website, a keyword is one of the elements that work to supply a website’s information to a search engine. The information itself is related to the contents that have been published on the website.

The keyword is an element that can be found in an HTML source code from a website page. It is important to note that the keyword must match the content of the said page. By doing that, we can let the search engine analyze whether its appliance is relevant or not.

Adding such a keyword is an easy thing to do. Today, you can use many SEO plugins that may help you add the keywords without risking or accidentally changing the website's coding. To do that, you can simply add the keywords in the keyword section and get the same result.

Is the Meta Keyword Still Relevant?

Around the past decade, exactly since the year of 2009, Google announced that it no longer used keywords to rank websites on its SERP. Even so, other search engines still use such a metric in managing their SEO analysis today.

In reality, the use of the keyword itself is advised to perform SEO optimization on a website today. Though generally, Google no longer uses the keyword in its algorithm, its appliance is still considered to be informative for internet users.

The Need of the Meta Keyword for SEO Optimization

The keyword is an effective tool to provide information related to certain contents of a website to the search engine. Although Google does not use such a metric any longer to rank website pages on its SERP, the keyword itself can still be utilized for other needs.

Today, such a keyword can be used in the internal tagging system. In order to do that, you can add the intended keywords by using this method:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”cmlabs seo tools”/>

Using the keyword on every website page will later help you check whether the keywords are related to the contents of the articles and used according to the SEO guideline easily.

How the Meta Keyword Works

Basically, the keyword is an element used to improve the SEO of a website page. The way it works is not that far off from the appliance of SEO in general. To see how it works, there are three stages of the keyword appliance, which are:

Indexing Process by the Search Engine

The existence of the keyword is something that is considered in the crawling process by the search engine. After acquiring data from a certain website, the search engine will proceed with the indexing process. However, it is important to note that the keyword itself is not considered to be the crucial factor in ranking website pages on SERP.

Collecting Information

Once the indexing process finishes, the search engine will collect information related to the keyword and the content that has been successfully indexed. At this stage, the search engine will make sure whether the content of a website page matches the keyword that we add.

Deciding Website Page Ranking on SERP

Even though the keyword is not considered to be essential enough to decide rankings, it is still a variable that should not be ignored. The use of the keyword, in this case, can mark which keywords are most searched and ranked high on SERP.

How to Write Meta Keywords

What is a meta keyword? It is a useful element that can inform the content of the article effectively to the search engine. Adding the keyword itself is not a difficult thing to do. You will not need to change the coding of your website page at all.

Writing the keywords is quite easy. You can use the available SEO plugins and type the intended words in the Keyword section. As an example, you can use Yoast SEO on WordPress to add the keyword to a certain post.

Before adding the keyword, you must do the manual setting first. Here are the steps on how to write keywords on Yoast SEO:

Open the tab Titles & Meta
Then choose the option Other
Afterward activate User meta keyword tag
Save the changes
Look for the Snippet
Add the keyword on Meta Keyword
Write down the keywords
At last click the Update button

Other than the keyword, you can also check the other meta tags such as meta title and meta description, by using the tool Title & Meta Description Checker from cmlabs. This online SEO tool is free and can be used to check the length of the title and the meta description characters of an article. If the indicator light turns green, then the title and the description comply to the rules of SEO properly.