Recently, there’s been another big resurgence of love for the meta-keywords tag – well, at least among a certain class of clients with whom I work.
This obsession and love is, obviously, pretty easy to rebut – you’ve got Danny Sullivan’s 2007 manifesto on the topic, you’ve got Wikipedia, and there are a billion more options. Yet, it keeps coming up.
In most of the cases I see, it’s because a client isn’t ranking as well as they think is their due. They seize on this as an option. In most cases, they’re in competitive markets, and they need to invest more completely in site promotion – off-site factors like link-building, public relations, brand building, and etc.
Many clients hate this as an answer.
Everyone is always going to want some element of on-site optimization – work on content, magical meta-tags, a new domain, etc. – to be the cure-all to whatever SEO woes they feel themselves to suffer. in some cases, redesign (or re-code), or the addition of content (to improve the keyword universe for which a site can compete) will help, don’t get me wrong. But once certain fundamentals are in place, it’s about socialization and promotion.
A site owner controls their site. It’s hard to control site promotion. Getting links requires legwork, networking, sales ability, and drive. Tweaking a meta-tag? Requires access to a decent CMS – and, if the fundamentals are in place, the tagging is probably not going to be a magic bullet.
On-site work is easy. This is not to say it’s unskilled. But it’s easy because you have control. Site promotion requires a lot of third-party buy-in, so it’s much harder. Hiring people to do it tends to be more expensive. And it’s a lot less attractive as a concept than ‘if I change this meta keywords attribute I will RULE THE GOOGLE!!!!’
Oh boy, same old song and dance. When will they ever learn?