October 6, 2009 is the end of the meta-keywords era, as Yahoo! – the last major search engine to support the tag – has finally announced they’ve dropped all support for it. The announcement was made during the “Ask The Search Engines” session at SMX East in New York, wherein Yahoo! stated they actually phased out support in their algorithm a month ago.
What does this mean to you? It means that those fancy little meta-keywords you’ve used to increase search traffic and page rank is all for naught (officially). With Yahoo! throwing in the towel, none of the major search engines – such as Google, Bing, Ask, and Yahoo! – provide support for the tag anymore. Sites that have relied on meta-keywords, will in fact notice a slight drop in page rank, and perhaps a drop in new traffic from search engines. Since this has been a long-coming phase-out, the change shouldn’t be that dramatic. However, many firms that claim to provide SEO services, do in fact leverage this method more than any other.
How can you adapt? Search engines use deep, ominous, unknown algorithms to determine what sites they’ll serve up when a query has been made by a user. While we don’t know all that they look for, we do know things they like. Some things you should start considering are:
- Site content: is the content on your site relevant to users? Is it rich in keywords, like the ones you would hope would display your site in search queries?
- Code/mark-up: is your site using clean, standards compliant code?
- Title tags: do the title tags on your site’s pages adequately explain what is on the page?
- Site maps: have you taken the time to submit XML site maps to all major search engines?
- URL’s: do the URL’s on your site contain unintelligible naming conventions, or are you using keyword-rich permalinks? Such as using www.yourdomain.com/who-we-are/our-team rather than www.yourdomain.com/services/?p=123
This should be a quick hit-list you can use to call up your current SEO firm and see exactly how adequately their search services are, and take necessary steps to rectify any potential issue you may encounter with these new changes. Of course there are many many other ways to improve SEO performance, however the bottom line in SEO is about text, links, popularity and reputation.
