Meta keywords vs tags

[saravanans]

On a blog from an SEO perspective how do you choose keywords to use in the "meta keyword tag" vs. "post tags"? Will it be different based on the search volume/competition of the keywords targeted?

[DavidKonigsberg]

Use post tags dont use meta keywords - Seo meta Keywords are not used anymore

[AdoptionHelp]

As David points out the meta keywords tag is ignored by every search engine that matters. If you poke around the SEOmoz tools you'll notice they recommend getting rid of them, only to prevent your competition from sniffing out your keywords (they still can, but they have to put more effort into it).

Post tags, in a wordpress context, is more a way of organizing your content for the benefit of your human readers, not the engine crawlers. A lot of blogs will use a tag cloud to show topics that are often covered, provide a cool visual element to the page, and to help their readers browse to stuff they want to read.

There is a potential to hurt your SEO with these tags. If you're on wordpress I recommend the SEO all in one pack plugin. Using this you can mark your tag pages (and author pages) as NOINDEX to prevent any possible duplicate content penalties.