I’m a bit slow on blogging this because I’ve been doing so many live talks, but, even last night, I was telling the audience that Google pays no attention to meta-keywords. Here’s Google’s “Friendly Face”, Matt Cutts confirming this:

Does this mean we should ignore meta keywords when optimising our pages for SEO? Hell, no. Google may be the Daddy, but there are plenty of little children out there reading and indexing this stuff. And that means traffic. The best approach though, as always, is:

- keep it relevant
- don’t overstuff (maximum 20 keywords)
- make sure your keywords are one’s that people are actually using to find you, not ones that you’ve just made up in the office

i.e. do your keyword research!

More details on how to do this properly in the Internet Marketing Training Area.

Interestingly, one law firm recently sent us reams of evidence to prove that we were using their clients’ trademark in our online marketing. We did this all innocently because the word itself is in the English language as parlance for the product we were selling, and there are plenty of keyword searches under that name. They even stopped us using embedded YouTube videos in our blogs that contained their protected name in the video titles. Something that had been put there by other people!

My point is this – it does pay to be careful about what keywords you use, even if Google says it pays no attention to them, because the more successful you get online the more attention you’re going to get. If you do sell anything online that has copyright or is a protected name, make sure you get permission from the company than owns the legal rights over the word before you start optimising for it.