What Is the Meta Keywords Tag?
The meta keywords tag was an HTML element that let site owners explicitly list the keywords they wanted a page to be associated with, once submitted directly to search engines as a ranking input.
Why It No Longer Matters
Because the tag was self-declared by site owners with no way to verify accuracy, it became one of the most heavily abused elements in early SEO — pages routinely stuffed it with irrelevant, high-volume keywords to try to rank for terms unrelated to their actual content. Google confirmed it stopped using the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor back in 2009, and other major search engines followed similar reasoning.
Its History
While it’s technically still valid HTML and won’t break anything if included, there’s no SEO benefit to maintaining it today, and most modern CMS platforms and SEO plugins no longer prompt for it by default.
