How META Keywords Affect Google Web Ranking and SEO…

…Why Google Announced They Don’t?

 

One of my favourite passages from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ runs something like:

故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。(故曰：知彼知己，百战不殆；不知彼而知己，一胜一负；不知彼，不知己，每战必殆。

So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

This week Google announced that it did not use the META keywords tag in web ranking, The Manchester SEO Blog investigates the reasons for the timing of this announcement.

Google recently announced that META Keywords do not affect Google’s Web Ranking, and since then the mainstream media has wrongly concluded that META keywords are therefore no longer a part of SEO. If you read (or watch!) Googles blog and video carefully, they never once said that META keywords do not have a role in SEO.

Why Did Google Choose To Announce This Now?

To be fair, inserting META Keywords without having the content to back them up, would have done little to promote your site for a while now.  To understand the reason behind Google’s timing of this announcement, we need to look at bigger picture and the context in which this announcement was made. Google have been inundated with law suites and legal cases over the course of several years, precisely because of keywords used in Google AdWords sponsored advertising. Most recently, they are fighting off a battle with Louis Vuitton who is suing Google because competitor companies have set up Google AdWords advertising campaigns around their brand names which are registered trademarks. But this is no isolated incident, they have been sued by American Airlines, Marks and Spencer, Consim, Rosetta Stone and a whole host of others. In fact, in Google’s official announcement, they even specifically mention suing in one of the examples.

The truly epic scale of these legal law suits became apparent last month with the European Court of Justice stepping in to intervene and back Google up.

What Links These Law Suits to the META Keyword Tag?

So what links all of these law suits to this legendary META keyword tag? Why does Google hope this announcement about META Keywords will somehow alleviate the situation? Well, the amount you end up paying per click with Google AdWords will vary depending on several factors, one of these is the quality score. And (of course!) part of ensuring a high quality score is making sure your website is optimised for the keywords you are campaigning on. While Google may be correct that the META keywords tag does not affect your “web ranking in search results” (Google’s own ambiguous words), there is clearly more to this story than that.

Why Keyword Context is Key to Search Advertising

What the marketing experts of these big companies probably don’t realise, is the importance of context within search advertising. When I’m sat watching TV, the advertiser doesn’t know my favourite areas of interest, I have no choice about the adverts that I watch and the advertiser knows little about their target audience. With a Google search, the keywords I enter indicate my specific area of interest, making it important to match my search with a product that lies within this area.

Lets suppose I searched for ‘cola’, I might be persuaded to buy Pepsi because my search was a little vague. However, if I’ve entered ‘Coca Cola’ (the registered trademark name), this is most likely because I have a preference already and while advertising on competitor trademarks like this might bring a few clicks, they would by unlikely to convert into any healthy level of sales to match the cost of advertising. The added bonus, is the company will have succeeded in compromising the quality of search during this process, which is why many would consider this a black hat SEO technique.

This example may be a little oversimplified, (maybe over used) but the same would be true if I were searching for ‘hotel manchester’ vs. ‘premier inn manchester’. Context is the key!

Tags: blackhat seo, context is key, Google, Google AdWords, keywords, manchester seo, manchester seo blog, meta keywords, search engine optimisation, SEO, target audience