In the last few years, digital marketers have debated the importance of keywords in an SEO strategy. To understand this debate, we’ll need to step back and briefly look at the history of SEO.
The meta keyword tag was introduced back in 1995, first popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista. Placed alongside the meta title and meta description tags in thesection of a website, the meta keyword tags were important indicators to early search engines as to what kind of content a webpage contained.
Back then search engines weren’t clever enough to be able to interpret such complex signals as their modern counterparts, which now use factors such as backlinks, anchor texts, and contextual linking to rank page content. Most early search engines could read just the meta tags and not much else. Simply by listing your target keywords in the meta tag, you could expect your website to rank quite well.
Fast forward to today’s hugely complex search engine algorithms, and you’ll soon discover that the meta keywords tag is all but extinct, only reportedly being referenced by a few search engines but not giving any SEO benefit. Google publicly announced that they no longer reference this tag back in 2009, and it was even suggested by Bing that using the tag incorrectly on your website could result in your organic ranking being penalized within their search engine. So nowadays most people don’t even bother using this tag, for it brings about no discernible SEO benefit.
The decision to drop the keyword meta tag came as no surprise to anyone in the SEO industry; most had argued that the tag had long been overused by “black hat” (read: unethical) SEO gurus as an easy way to “keyword stuff,” a way of cramming specific target keywords onto a website even if they provide no real benefit to the end user.
Search algorithms have evolved significantly in recent years, with complex machine learning algorithms from search engines like Google making it much harder for people to game the system.
The evolution of search (and role of keywords)
Now that search engines have become smarter, what role do keywords have left to play? The traditional SEO strategy of identifying specific non-branded keywords (keywords that don’t have your hotel name in them, such as “family hotels in Barcelona”) and then using that exact phrase within the meta tags and text of the webpage is relatively outdated, especially when you consider how search engines have evolved.
