Sk-etchbook

The question of whether meta tags (specifically keywords) are of any use at all any more all always seems to receive a mumbled response. They used to be important, but for a long while now they have played little to no part in search engine listings. My previous stance was that they have little or none influence on results but description should be used as this is seen in results and keywords are worth adding as they take no time and are good admin. This forum post reflects that: Digital Point

The most important ones you should be sure to use are;
keywords
description
distribution=global or us or uk...
index=follow all or no follow...index all or no index
author=personal name or business name

However I still thought I'd check to see if there was an official bottom line response out there. And here it is:

View the official response from Google's Matt Cutts or view a full post and video on the Google Web Master Blog.

Unfortunately Google is only one of the search engines and making catering to them all is like throwing a barbecue and inviting a vegetarian, a Muslim, a guy with a nut allergy, a woman allergic to fish, wheat and gluten and a man with no mouth. And then attempting to make them all happy.

Google does command between 60 to 80 per cent of market share in various locations across the world so it should be the most influential. However the next largest are Yahoo and Bing.

Here is a good post on Search Engine Land referring to Yahoo's announcement (Oct 09) that it is dropping support for keywords tag, closely followed up by another report contradicting this. This is supported by many other tests reveling that keywords "DO" affect Yahoo still. Assumable they still have a ghost in their machine.

The former article also discusses Bing. Apparently they don't support meta keywords, but they have a big guide on how to use them on their official blog. A great example of how as soon as something can increase search rankings it is manipulated (in this case blogs) and exploited at the expense of quality. Presumably written by outside paid blogger.

And after all this research where am I? Exactly where I was when I started!!!

Keywords have little to no SEO use but ya may as well stick 'em in there. Good for organization and admin purposes.

Time well spent!