Meta Keywords Are Still Worth it in 2024

It is widely known that Google no longer considers meta keywords as a ranking factor (nor do they diminish rankings). This, however, does not diminish the relevance and advantages of utilizing meta keywords on your website. While they may not directly impact user experience or Google search ranking like other meta tags do, meta keywords continue to hold value for two primary reasons. Firstly, numerous search engines besides Google still rely on meta keywords for ranking purposes. Secondly, smaller web crawlers and directory sites utilize meta keywords to categorize and understand website content, offering additional exposure and visibility. Thus, including meta keywords can only help.

Expanding Reach Across Multiple Search Engines

While Google dominates the search engine market share, several other search engines, including Yandex, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, Ask.com, and more, continue to use meta keywords as a factor in their ranking algorithms. By including relevant meta keywords, you can potentially enhance your visibility and reach a broader audience across these alternative search engines. Neglecting meta keywords altogether could result in missed opportunities for attracting valuable organic traffic from non-Google search engines.

Increasing Visibility on Web Crawlers and Directory Sites

Various web crawlers, alternative directories, and news feeds rely on meta keywords to categorize and understand the content of websites. These services scrape the internet, analyze metadata, and organize websites into directories or lists. By including meta keywords, you facilitate their understanding of your site's purpose, making it easier for these services to accurately categorize your website. This can result in improved visibility within niche directories, alternative service listings, and news feeds that rely on metadata to showcase relevant content.

Enhanced Accessibility for Smaller Web Crawlers

Unlike Google's sophisticated algorithms, smaller web crawlers and indexing bots often lack the computational power to process and understand a webpage's entire content comprehensively. In such cases, meta keywords act as a concise summary, providing a glimpse into the website's topic or niche. Including relevant meta keywords ensures that these smaller crawlers can quickly and efficiently categorize your site, leading to better indexing and potential exposure to a wider audience through specialized directories and search platforms.

Despite Google's decision to drop the use of meta keywords in its ranking algorithm, their relevance and benefits persist in the broader landscape of SEO. By including meta keywords on your website, you can expand your reach across multiple search engines that still consider them a ranking factor. Additionally, smaller web crawlers and directory sites rely on meta keywords to categorize and understand website content, facilitating better visibility and exposure within niche directories and alternative service listings. Therefore, incorporating meta keywords, along with other essential meta tags, can maximize your website's SEO potential and ensure broader accessibility across the digital ecosystem in 2024.

The advantage to incorporating meta keywords is marginal, and therefore not worth the added human labor required to write it. That’s why it is advantageous to use Loyae to automatically generate and insert keywords at the cost of a few pennies.