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Meta Keywords Tag As a Keyword Research Tool

January 14th, 2011 at 2:22 PM CET in SEO

Once upon a time, the meta keywords tag was a great way to improve your ranking for the keywords you desired. You just entered you favorite keywords in it and the site started ranking better for that keyword. As you might have guessed, people soon started abusing the keywords tag. Because of this, most of the major search engines (including Google) have dropped the meta keywords tag as a ranking signal.

Target

Photo credits: ogimogi

Keyword research tool

Lucky for us, thousands upon thousands of webmasters still enter the keywords they wish to target in the meta keywords tag, which created a great keyword research possibility. By looking up websites related to your own (future) website, you can extract the targeted keywords from them, and target these keywords yourself!

An example about Joomla templates

Say you are developing a (purely hypothetical ;-) website that sells Joomla templates. How could you use the meta keywords tag to research possible keywords to target on that website?

1. Go to Google.com if you are targeting an international audience, or the local version of Google if you are targeting a country specific audience

2. Type your search query in the input box, in our case: joomla templates

3. Open the top 10 (or 20, 50, 100 depending on how thorough you want to do your research) results

www.joomla24.com/
www.joomla-templates.com/
www.joomlashack.com/products/professional-joomla-templates
www.bestofjoomla.com/component/option,com_bestoftemplate/Itemid,46/
www.templatemonster.com/joomla-templates.php
www.joomlabyte.com/
joomlatp.com/
www.rockettheme.com/joomla-templates
www.siteground.com/joomla-hosting/joomla-templates.htm
www.joomlashine.com/

4. Open the source code (usually ctrl-u, or search for 'view source' in your browser menu)
5. Search the source code for the meta keywords tag (ctrl-f on the term 'keywords' is fastest)
6. Extract the keywords listed in the meta tag

The extraction of keywords from the 10 sites above resulted in over 250 non-duplicate keywords. Some of them are pretty self-evident such as:

joomla
templates
joomla templates
free joomla templates
premium joomla templates

Others create interesting opportunities for keywords to target with content or on your entire website such as:

joomla church templates
joomla real estate templates
business joomla templates
joomla portal template
custom joomla template

7. Use tools such as the Google Keyword Tool or Google Insights for Search to get an idea of the expected search volume for each of the keywords.

Happy keyword researching!

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User Comments (5)

Add comment

Renée

January 22nd, 2011 at 12:48 AM CET

Wow, this is pretty nice stuff to know about. Though I'm not a website guru I really diddn't realise google diddn't rank on meta keywords anymore. Time to change my website! Thanks guys!

seo outsourcing

April 28th, 2011 at 6:51 AM CEST

Indeed, I happen to use peek at the competitors website for their META keywords and also search for similar keywords on the net for potential identification of competitors. Given than META keywords nowadays are dispensable, they can still be used for competitive research.

Outsourcing

August 12th, 2011 at 10:25 AM CEST

Yeah @Renee, and other websites no longer include the keyword meta, so what I do is I check the articles/comments of my competitors to see which keywords they are targeting.

SEO outsourcing

April 12th, 2012 at 7:47 AM CEST

Meta tags are traditional methods and plays no part to search engines, but still used by individuals. We accept changes for better outcome or if it will affect negatively, thus the case of meta tags, it was relevant then, but now as you said due to abuse is no longer relevant. Therefore, why change. Thanks to this topic, I find this very informative.