Meta Keywords For Bing Not Google

Some SEO experts, gurus and firms say to ignore the Keyword Meta tag when optimizing your Web site.  "It is a useless piece of code." But is it?

What Do The Search Engines Say About Meta Keywords?
It was confirmed on September 21 by the Google Webmaster Central Blog that "Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking."  Does this mean that Google will always ignore the keywords meta tag? "It's possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it's unlikely."

 Up and coming search engine Bing has not recommended that we abandon meta keywords.  "The meta tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content."

Yahoo in an article titled, "How to Improve the Position of Your Website in Yahoo! Search Results", says "Use a 'keyword' meta-tag to list keywords for each page of your website. Use distinct lists of keywords that relate to each specific page on the site. Do not use one broad set of keywords for the entire site."

Before Creating Your Web Pages

1. Determine the topic to be discussed
2. Conduct keyword research to determine which words are being used by searchers and how often.
3. Write your keyword meta tag with keywords in rank order of importance.  Do not ignore the long tail keywords, synonyms and misspellings. Keyword tags should be mostly unique for each page.
   
4. Write the URLs, page titles and meta descriptions.
5. Write the on-page copy.
   

Note that keywords should be determined prior to creating the page.  Too often this is skipped and after poor results in the search engines the Web site owner hires a SEO expert to come in and fix it.  It is cheaper to do it right the first time.