Many of my clients who have indulged themselves spending too many sleepless hours on the internet and tried to educate themselves better in marketing their website, only to find out that they were being fed with false information (Talk about the evil thing that internet can do to you!).
The most common issue is the meta tag keyword description. Many people still thinks that this tag holds the primary key to their site ranking. Hence, wasting efforts in maximising the use of the keywords in the tag.
The bad news is, well, the tag is useless! At least for Google. But since Google holds the majority of the search engine market, it is pretty substantial.
According to Matt Cutts, one of the reason why Google ignores this tag is because site owners are abusing the use of it. An example that he provided in the Google webmaster blog is as follows. Supposed you run a company called AliceCo and your competitor runs BobCo. Being a "smart" entrepreneur, BobCo decided that adding "AliceCo" keyword in meta tag keyword description within his website will surely crash you in the page ranking war. The good news is, BobCo is not on the money at all, as Google robot does not use meta keyword description tag.
Please watch the video below for a more comprehensive explanation by Matt Cutts:
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Does that mean we should not use this tag at all?
Although the tag is being ignored by Google, but I normally shove some keywords within the tag anyway as a good practice. It doesn’t harm you having it there. So why not?
