Matt Cutts at Google makes it official: “Google uses over two hundred signals in our web search rankings, but the keywords meta tag is not currently one of them, and I don’t believe it will be.”
All I can say is Thank you Google for finally making it official.
I am by no means a pro at SEO but I do my best to stay on top of what can help and what can hurt your search engine rankings. And I can’t tell you how many times while discussing on-site SEO that I will hear “but I have all of the keywords in the meta tag” why isn’t it working?!” I wish it were that easy.
But don’t get this wrong. This is not the key WORDS in the content – As I have been saying all along ..
Keywords don’t need to be used in your meta tags, but they need to be used in your content, title and header tags.
Read more about how “Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking” on the “Official Google Webmaster Blog” (can’t get more official than that).