Lydia Kim

Apr 25, 2024
15 Views

Should Meta Search Terms be included in every webpage's meta tags?

Shahid Maqbool

Founder
Answered on Apr 25, 2024
Recommended

No, you definitely don't need to include meta search terms or meta keyword tags on every single page these days. In fact, it's generally not recommended for SEO purposes anymore.

The major search engines like Google have explicitly stated they don't use the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor. Their algorithms are advanced enough to analyze and extract the relevant keywords and topics from your actual page content itself.

Including meta keywords was a tactic that made more sense in the early days, but it quickly became abused for keyword stuffing - just throwing in tons of irrelevant keywords to try and manipulate rankings. Modern engines see this as a spammy practice that can potentially lead to penalties or devaluation.

From a technical perspective too, meta keywords just create code expansion and add redundant information to your pages that the search engines already have better ways of determining relevance from.

The SEO best practices today are to focus on having high-quality, rich content that's properly optimized with thoughtful use of your target keywords in things like:

- Page titles and headings

- Body content and formatting

- Image alt text

- Meta descriptions to encourage click-throughs

- Implementing structured data and schema markup

Building authority and earning high-quality backlinks are also way more impactful for rankings than cramming keywords into a meta tag.

Your effort is better spent making sure you have a sustainable, search engine-friendly website architecture and content strategy in place.

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