I thought I would share this question a gal asked in a forum, and what my reply was. She asked;

My blog ranks in Google’s first page of results for two keywords, which aren’t included in my meta tags. They’re just merely words I’ve used in two separate posts before, and alone don’t reflect much of what my blog is all about.

This was my reply to her question.

“First off, Google does not place any weight on meta tags as they did in the past. The reason? Too many webmasters manipulated their rank by spamming with keywords, used within their meta tags. The Google bot is instructed to pay more attention to your content. That’s why the content that you mentioned is placing your blog higher up in search results than your meta tags!

Does it mean you should not use meta tags at all? That’s up to you, but you should also possibly consider reducing the current number of meta tags you have on your site. You should really only have about a dozen tags, and without repeating words too often.

Your strongest tags to get results will be what you use within posts, bolded text, and post titles. That’s one reason it’s also important for a blogger to try to pick a niche and stick to it as much as possible because everything posted will affect what may, or may not become keywords for your blog.”

You probably noticed I told her that she had too many meta tags. While viewing her site I counted over 20 tags, but her tags were not just one to three word tags - each one was nearly a sentence of around 3 - 5 words! I counted each set of tags as one tag when I just described her blog as having around 20 tags because I lost count, as there were way too many words!

So, what’s the mystery of meta tags? Be very cautious with how you utilize them, and use fewer than what you think you should. In fact you may consider not using any meta tags and instead just concentrate on the keywords you use within your content. In regards to meta tags the K.I.S.S. rule applies! Keep it simple silly, and remember that less is more!

For further reading here’s a great article on meta keyword tags:

Meta Tags SEO Article