Does Meta Keywords Tag Matter?

I’ve been developing a couple of websites now and thought I’d share some of the observations I made along the way. Feel free to state your opinion as well.

First of all, I’ve never ever seen the meta tag “keywords” ever matter. Never. The “Description” tag matters, in the sense that Google will pick it up to describe what the page or the website you have published is all about.

When you have a couple of ad-based websites, you can easily get obsessive over how to best drive quality traffic to them. By quality traffic I mean visits from people that was actually looking for what you had to say or the products you sell/services you offer. In pursuing this, we’ve all come to realize the importance of the <title> tag, the <h1> tag, and of course the off site elements; the quality back-links. The latter being the most important of all.

Anyways, in all of this I have played around with changing/tweaking the keyword meta tag but it has never given me any visible benefits. On the other hand, it has never given me any grief either so for most of the sites I manage, I keep them there. Nice and clean.

Except for this site. This site has no meta keywords, and if you got here via Google or some other search engine looking for information on what to do with your meta keyword tags, then all the better. It proves my point.

I’d be more than happy to hear from anyone who have had similar or opposite experiences in this area.