Google has publicly confirmed it does not use the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor — and hasn’t since 2009. So while it’s technically simple to add, meta keywords for SEO purposes on Google carry essentially zero weight today. The honest, useful answer isn’t “how to use them,” but “why they’re no longer worth your time,” and where that time is better spent instead.
If you’ve been asked to fill in a “meta keywords” field in your CMS and wondered whether it actually does anything, the short version is: for Google, no — and Google is where nearly all of your organic traffic is coming from.
The meta keywords tag is a small piece of HTML code, historically written as <meta name="keywords" content="...">, that site owners used in the early 2000s to explicitly tell search engines which terms a page was about. In the earliest era of search engines, before more sophisticated content analysis existed, this tag genuinely influenced rankings — which is exactly why it was abused so heavily.
By the mid-2000s, the meta keywords tag had become one of the most manipulated elements on the web — site owners would stuff it with dozens of irrelevant, high-traffic terms with no connection to the actual page content, purely to try to rank for them. Google confirmed directly, in a public statement in 2009, that it does not use the meta keywords tag in its ranking algorithm at all, specifically because of how unreliable and manipulated the signal had become.
This is the core reason the honest answer to “are meta keywords important for SEO” is no — at least where Google is concerned, and Google represents the overwhelming majority of search traffic for most websites.
Bing has, at various points, suggested it may weigh the meta keywords tag slightly as one of many minor signals — though even Bing has cautioned that misusing it (stuffing it with unrelated terms) can actually work against a site rather than help it. In practice, this residual, minor use on one secondary search engine doesn’t come close to justifying meaningful time investment, especially compared to the SEO elements that genuinely do matter.
There’s also a narrower, legitimate use case worth mentioning: some internal site search tools and content management systems use a page’s keywords field for their own internal search or categorization — not for external SEO or Google rankings, but for helping visitors find content once they’re already on the site.
This is one of the most common points of confusion, and it matters because one of these genuinely affects SEO while the other doesn’t. The meta keywords tag (largely obsolete) is different from the meta description tag, which Google still displays directly in search results and which meaningfully influences click-through rate, even though it isn’t a direct ranking factor either. If a business is going to spend time optimizing any “meta” field, the meta description deserves that time — the meta keywords tag does not.
Since meta keywords for SEO purposes offer essentially no return, the same effort is far better directed toward things that do move the needle:
There’s no harm in leaving them in an existing site — they won’t hurt rankings, since Google simply ignores them. But there’s also no benefit to keeping them, other than perhaps the narrow internal-search use case mentioned earlier. For most sites, it’s a low-priority cleanup item rather than something urgent — worth removing during a broader technical cleanup, but not worth interrupting other, higher-impact SEO work to address specifically.
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