META Keywords tag will not help a Flash website

In fact it won’t help any website.

I recently had an email from a Flash website owner who said that his website designer assured him that the META Keywords tag would help overcome a Flash site’s search engine weakness. Sadly, no.

Despite some SEO hype types, in reality the META Keywords tag is DEAD. Yep, dead … and has been for half a decade.

Danny Sullivan founder of Search Engine Watch first shared that fact with us in Oct 2002. More recently, Jan 2008, the Editor of Technologyevangelist.com expanded on the Keyword tag’s death, why search engines quit using the Keywords tag to rank search results and related a perspective regarding a friend of his website. And there is even this item from the Search Engine Guide Blog on why the only beneficiary of using the Keyword tag could be your competition.

So use the Keywords tag it if you want. But don’t pay for it, don’t spend much time on it and realize that it serves much less functional purpose than your appendix.

UPDATE – 12-10-08

There is still people out there “selling” the keywords tag as a SEO tool. And the keywords tag is as dead as ever. Here is another report showing the reasons not to use the keywords tag … in video, by SEO specialist Dr. David Kyte.

Related posts:

1. Search optimizing a basic BluDomain Flash website How-To
2. How to choose the right content keywords for maximum organic search traffic
3. Some of the most important customers to “see” your website are not human.
4. A Dream Wedding by Sharon Replaces Their Old Bludomain Flash Website with a New WordPress Site
5. Flash based websites: “the accessibility and searchability of a brick”