Chiropractic SEO Question of the Week: Do meta keyword tags still matter? This week's question comes from Dr. Bird from the UK.
Meta tags are content that appear on the code of your website, but don't actually show up on the page. There are many different kinds of meta tag, and some of these are very important. For instance, the meta "title" tag tells Google the title of your page, and that's what shows up in the Google search results as the link that goes to your site. That tag is very important and can help boost your SEO.
Another one of those tags is the meta "keyword" tag. Back in the early days of the web, the search engines were very simple. The keyword tag was an easy way to tell those primitive search engines what kind of content was on the page. You could create a page on your site, and use the keywords, "Chiropractic, San Diego, back pain," and you'd rank pretty well for those search terms based on that and the content on your page.
Well, it didn't take long for people to figure out that if you just jammed a bunch of keywords into the meta keyword field, you could trick the search engines and get better ranking.
Google figured that out and stopped using the meta keyword tags in their indexing back in 2009 (and probably before that), as Matt Cutts explains here.
So, the short answer to this week's question is, no. Meta keyword tags don't do a thing for your search ranking.
This is a good question to ask "SEO experts." We still have clients who will hire SEO people who recommend that they jam a bunch of keywords in the meta tags. These "experts" have no idea what they're doing, so it's a good question to ask them if they come to you claiming that they can boost your site ranking.
Now, there are ways to actually target specific keywords on your site pages, and we'll talk about that in future videos.
Do you have any questions about chiropractic SEO? Ask me here, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
If you'd like some help with your chiropractic marketing strategy, we can also help you with that with our Chiropractic Marketing Service.
If you'd like to be notified about our future chiropractic marketing posts, sign up below and we'll send you an email with our newest articles.
