ONPAGE · SEO GLOSSARY
Meta Keywords
A defunct HTML meta tag listing comma-separated keywords for a page — ignored by Google since 2009 and by all major search engines, but still incorrectly included on many sites as a wasted effort.
Definition
The meta keywords tag (`<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">`) was originally used by early search engines in the 1990s and early 2000s to understand what a page was about. It was widely abused — pages would include hundreds of irrelevant keywords to try to rank for unrelated queries — and all major search engines eventually stopped using it as a ranking signal. Google officially announced in September 2009 that it ignores the meta keywords tag entirely. Bing announced similarly. Yahoo (now running Bing's index) does the same. No major search engine uses meta keywords as a ranking signal. The tag is completely inert from an SEO perspective. Despite this, many CMS plugins, SEO toolkits, and legacy site templates still include a meta keywords field, and many websites still fill it in — wasting editorial time with zero SEO benefit.
Why it matters for SEO
Meta keywords are irrelevant to modern SEO — adding them does nothing positive. The reason to audit for them: (1) if your team is spending time filling in meta keywords fields believing they have SEO value, that time is wasted; redirect the effort to title tags and meta descriptions, which do matter; (2) a meta keywords tag listing your target keywords is readable by competitors — it's essentially a public keyword map that tells competitors exactly what you're targeting on each page. Some SEO practitioners recommend leaving the field empty or removing it for this reason. The audit surfaces pages with meta keywords tags to confirm whether they exist and flags them as low-priority noise rather than an actionable issue.
How DeepSEOAnalysis checks this
The audit detects `<meta name="keywords">` tags in page HTML. It flags them as informational (not an error — they're harmless), notes that they have no SEO value, and recommends removing them if they contain confidential keyword strategy data or if filling them in is consuming editorial time. The keyword field in CMS SEO plugins can typically be hidden or disabled to prevent the pattern from continuing.
Useful tools and resources
GLOSSARY
Related terms
onpage
Meta Description
An HTML tag that describes a page's content; used by search engines to generate SERP snippets when relevant to the query.
Read definition →onpage
Title Tag
The HTML <title> element that names a page in browser tabs, SERP snippets, and social shares — the single most important on-page SEO element.
Read definition →technical
Robots Meta Tag
An HTML `<meta name="robots">` tag that tells crawlers whether to index a page, follow its links, or display snippets — more granular than robots.txt.
Read definition →onpage
Open Graph Tags
Meta tags that control how a page appears when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, and other platforms that read OG metadata.
Read definition →onpage
On-Page SEO
Optimising the content and HTML elements of an individual page — title tag, meta description, headings, body copy, images, and internal links — to rank for its target query.
Read definition →See how your site scores on Meta Keywords.
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