The meta keywords tag is an HTML tag that lets a page list the words it wants to be found for, for example <meta name="keywords" content="wedding photographer, Surrey, venues">. Google does not use it for ranking, and has said so publicly since 2009.
How meta keywords worked
In the early days of search engines, pages declared their own topics. Engines read the keywords tag as a quick guide to what a page covered, which was useful when algorithms were simple and the web was small.
It did not last. Because the tag was invisible to visitors, site owners could fill it with anything: hundreds of terms, competitors’ brand names, popular searches unrelated to the page. The tag became one of the first casualties of keyword stuffing, and search engines stopped trusting it. Google announced in September 2009 that it had not used the tag in web ranking for a long time. Other major engines followed, and Bing has said that a stuffed keywords tag is more likely to be read as a spam signal than a useful one.
Some platforms and plugins still offer a keywords field. A few internal site search tools and smaller search engines may read it, but for Google and Bing it carries no ranking value.
Why it matters
For most UK businesses the tag matters only because it wastes time and can mislead. I still meet owners who were told by a web designer that the keywords field is where SEO happens, and who have spent hours filling it in while the visible content, the title tag and the meta description were neglected.
There is also a competitive downside. The tag is readable by anyone who views the page source, so it hands a list of your target terms to competitors without giving you anything back. A well-filled tag on a rival’s service page is one of the first things a curious competitor checks when planning their own content.
Common mistakes
- Believing the tag still affects Google. If an agency report or proposal lists meta keywords as a deliverable, ask what else they are doing, because this alone changes nothing.
- Confusing it with keyword targeting. Choosing the right term for each page still matters a great deal. It is just expressed in the content, headings and title rather than in a hidden tag.
- Stuffing it with competitor names. It adds no ranking value and makes your intentions visible to anyone who looks.
- Treating news keywords as the same thing. The separate news_keywords tag was used by Google News, which also no longer relies on it.
How to act on it
You do not need to add meta keywords to any page. If your site already has them, removing them is tidy but not urgent; they do no harm to rankings unless they are wildly stuffed. On a site with thousands of pages, a single template change in your CMS or SEO plugin usually takes them all out. A crawler such as Screaming Frog can list every URL still carrying the tag, so you can confirm the change reached the whole site, including old blog posts and landing pages built outside the main theme.
Put the effort where it counts. Decide one main search term for each page through proper keyword research, use it naturally in the title, the main heading and the opening paragraph, and answer the questions people searching that term actually have. That page-level work is what my on-page SEO service focuses on.