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There seems to be a bit of confusion around what exactly “optimizing” your web site’s pages really is.

Many people associate SEO or optimizing your pages as updating and “optimizing” your meta tags. Specifically, the meta keywords tag.

You know the tag, the one in your HTML code that looks like this:

The fact is, very few search engines (Yahoo being an exception), use the meta keywords tag as a factor in determining what your web page is about.

It used to be a very large determining factor but as with anything that’s easily manipulated, it became exploited by some unscrupulous webmasters who would stuff all kinds of unrelated (but popular) terms in these tags in the hopes of getting ranked well. And it worked. For a short amount of time.
So the question is, should you be using them at all?

Well, Yahoo still considers them a factor as stated in their webmasters guidelines so it is still helpful to use them, but just remember that the words you place in this tag are only a fraction of the optimization factors that go into your entire website.

Which brings us back to our topic at hand…meta tags and SEO are not the same thing. Meta tags are only a small portion of the overall criteria in SEO and by using ONLY meta tags in your web pages, you are doing yourself a tremendous disservice.

Look to more important tags, such as your title tag and the name of your page and most of all, do not forget that content is extremely important. After all, it’s the whole reason you created the page in the first place, right?