SEO - all about Keywords - guidelines, tools and other resources

1. Introduction

The keywords attribute used in a meta element is intended to provide the top keywords associated to the web-page's content especially to the search engines. For more information check out this Wikipedia article.

1.1. Importance of keywords

"Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements. In July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them.

No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engines today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself. With respect to Google, thirty-seven leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta-attribute keywords is little to none. However, the same article also suggests that Yahoo still makes use of the keywords meta tag in some of its rankings.

"Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a Web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes." - For more information check out this Wikipedia article.

Yahoo itself claims support for the keyword meta tag in conjunction with other factors for improving search rankings." - From the Wikipedia article.

2. Articles

From Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tag#The_keywords_attribute

3. Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Service Provided - Keyword ideas for phrases and web pages.

Link - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Obviously from a trusted source - Google. This is a brilliant tool that gives you keyword ideas for phrases or even existing web pages. I find the second option very useful as it lets me tweak/re-organise my webpage keywords based on its content to get better search engine visibility.