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Keywords are important. The keywords meta tag is not.

Earlier this week, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed what has been long-suspected among SEO professionals: The search engine places no value on the keywords meta tag. 

Cutts is referring to keywords inserted behind the scenes, in the header area of your site’s HTML. To see whether they’ve been entered on your site (or any site), view a page’s source and look for an area resembling this:

<meta name=“keywords” content=“Keyword 1, Keyword 2, Keyword 3, Keyword 4”/>

In the early days of search engines, the keywords meta tag was a key factor in Google’s rankings. However, the tag was easily abused and many web developers adopted keyword “stuffing” techniques designed to manipulate search results. Common stuffing tactics included referencing competitors, keyword variations and trendy search terms that were unrelated to the site.

In response, search engines minimized the importance of the keywords tag. And now, at least for Google, they don’t matter at all. As Cutts stated:

Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.

Let’s be clear: It remains very important to identify the most important keywords for your site, and to use them in your content and other meta data (title tags, meta descriptions, etc.).

However, don’t agonize over the terms and phrases in your keywords meta tag. Your time is better spent optimizing other aspects of your site.