The Meteoric Rise and Fall of The Keyword Meta-Tag by Ba Kiwanuka
From humble origins hailing from parts unknown, for a good while now the
Keyword Meta-Tag with its perhaps better known twin, simply referred to as The
Keyword (a la rapper style) have dominated the SEO stage with energy, style and
unmistakable charisma. But while The Keyword's star continues to soar ever
higher that of its lesser sibling, Keyword Meta-Tag, is sadly on the decline.
Here then is the riveting tale of these former SEO superstar brothers and
one-time search engine darlings.
A few years ago, back when search engine algorithms were as functional and
complicated as the androids depicted in B-movies from the late seventies, The
Keyword and Keyword Meta-Tag began to take the SEO world by storm. Webmasters
realized that they could manipulate their websites' rankings by tweaking the
Keyword Meta-Tag. How? By inserting as many targeted keywords in the Keyword
Meta-tag, they figured that they could influence the rankings of said websites
by confusing the rather simple search engine algorithms of the time into
incorrectly identifying their websites as qualified for those keywords; even
though such keywords never appeared anywhere in the main body of text.
Not to be outdone by its less showy sibling, The Keyword really grew into its
own and took center stage with a vengeance soon after. In a somewhat Paris
Hiltonesque approach (no publicity is bad publicity) wily webmasters figured
that more keywords translated into better rankings so why not stuff the main
body of text with hundreds (if not thousands) of such keywords; never mind the
trifling inconvenience that the text might read a tad awkward.
Thus was born the well established and proven technique (well at least for a
while) known as keyword stuffing. In fact edgier webmasters ventured beyond the
point of simple everyday keyword stuffing and started to incorporate
"invisible" keyword text into their pages. This they achieved by inserting
targeted keywords onto their web pages disguised in the same color as the
background of that particular web page. The end result was that a keyword could
be replicated thousands of times over on the same web page without interrupting
the natural flow of the text (i.e., not read unnaturally to visitors to the
site) because for all intents and purposes such text was invisible to the human
eye. (This is an example of blackhat techniques.)
But the search engines quickly caught on and stiff penalties were meted out to
offending websites. Truth be told, the search engine that really addressed this
issue with swift, aggressive vigilante justice, was none other than The Big
Dawg--Google. MSN appeared to be little concerned with the whole affair; it
would seem that Microsoft was more concerned with listening to the sweet sound
of ka-ching reverberating from the profits of its Windows Operating System. And
also perhaps they were a little tied up with all those pesky law suits that
seemed to never end. But I digress. The point here is that one could still get
away with keyword stuffing on the lesser giants of search (i.e., MSN) but the
party was most definitely over as far as Google was concerned. A new algorithm
tweak was incorporated which led to the hotly debated
keyword/number-of-words-on-a-page ratio or percentage.
It is still possible though to find a number of websites ranking high on Google
with obvious elements of keyword stuffing. One can only assume that such
websites got away with it because Google was more concerned with arresting the
disturbing trend of keyword stuffing than punishing past offenders. But the
same could not be said for the living-dangerously invisible-text webmasters.
Google came down hard, smackdown style, and such websites fell off the
chartered territories of known search. Interestingly enough, as Microsoft came
to the better-late-than-never realization that there is mucho dinero to be made
from search, and perhaps galvanized by waning fortunes in the OS industry, they
too adopted Google-like web page filters which really kicked in early-to-mid
2006 (Yahoo generally seems to embrace Google tweaks before MSN so you can bet
they are already onboard). Bottom line it's no longer as easy to skedaddle your
way up the MSN SERPs (search engine rank pages) as it used to be.
In an ever increasing bid to return the most accurate results for a search
query, it would appear that these days Google seems to ignore the Keyword
Meta-Tag altogether and rather analyzes the words and identifies keywords from
the main body of text on a webpage as its governing basis for ranking that
page. You don't have to be a genius to figure out that Yahoo and MSN will soon
implement the same modifications if they haven't already; where The Big Dawg
paws the lesser mutts will surely follow.
So does this mean that you shouldn't bother optimizing for the Keyword Meta-Tag
anymore? Not at all. There're plenty of lesser search engines out there that
still identify the Keyword Meta-Tag as being important, so if you don't wish to
lose potential traffic from such search engines, it's better to continue
optimizing for the Keyword Meta-Tag.
As to what really dimmed the star of the once-upon-a-time SEO stage darling,
the Keyword Meta-Tag, perhaps it was merely a matter of public fickleness or
over-exposure. But if such was truly the case some argue, how come the Keyword
Meta-Tag's sibling, The Keyword, continues to perform from strength to
strength? To that we can only speculate, but maybe it's simply that the
powers-that-be recognize the fact that to keep the show rolling you need at
least one superstar!
More
Internet Marketing SEO Tips and Advice
About the Author
Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
|
