Meta keywords tag?

[dfwgolfer]

Because Google is cracking on  spammy keywords should I remove my meta keywords tag altogether? I hear they dont factor it in anyway?

[StreamlineMetrics]

Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)

That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.

[danatanseo]

I agree with Streamline's comments. It's not going to hurt or help your SEO efforts. So, there's not going to be a benefit in removing them (other than effecting your competitors ability to see them, as Streamline said), nor will there be a benefit in populating them.

[dfwgolfer]

Thanks for getting me up to speed on that. Keyword tags worked like 15 years ago huh!

So besides the title and desription tags, are there any other valuable meta tags I should be aware of?

[danatanseo]

Yes, definitely. Depending on what type of site you have you might want to consider meta tags for Facebook'g Open graph, and definitely you will want to include or

You might also want to include Structured Data. Information on this can be found at http://www.schema.org

Hope that's helpful!

[GeorgeAndrews]

For some questions like this one, it is beneficial to do a quick search to see if your question may have already been answered.

For example, here is a previous post that is very similar: http://www.seomoz.org/q/should-i-remove-meta-keywords-tags.

You can use the "Search for a Question" box above and to the left, but I prefer to do a Google search for the keyword phrase I am looking for + "seomoz". Example: https://www.google.com/search?q=meta+keywords+seomoz

Hope this helps for future questions!

[polarking]

I am not sure what platform your site is running on. I know that meta keywords do not help as far as SEO is concerned. We use Big Commerce and meta keywords help our sites internal site search. Something to think about. You can do a quick test by putting non related keyword on a page or product to see if your internal site search picks it up..