When I started my SEO career in late 1997 it was easy to obtain rankings by simply optimizing the keyword tag and it didn’t take long, maybe a year or two, before that tag was so abused it lost significant value with the search engines. Then the SEO world began to yell to anyone who would listen that the keyword tag was dead. So much so, I remember reading a comment from a poster at a major international SEO firm who said they were not even putting a keyword tag on the sites they optimized. Well, I’m here to tell you from real results the keyword tag is not DEAD!
You heard me (or read me), I have never stopped using the keyword tag for my clients BUT what I have done is to use it for very specific purposes.
How?
Well one example in particular is misspellings. One of my clients resides in the legal>medical arena and during the keyword research phase I found several misspelling of a particular medical disorder that generated good search numbers on a daily basis. As you can imagine the client had no interest in placing misspellings in the visible content on their site so I placed it in a keyword tag along with several dozen other misspellings. For the past 5 years the site has ranked on the front page of Google & MSN for the term and some of the others and bounces between the top three pages on Yahoo. There has been no link building done using the term, no alt tags or other means and certainly no Black Hat Practices are in play. That’s the facts maam, you can draw your own conclusion but I’m sticking by mine … the keyword tag is not DEAD!
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