what are meta keywords in seo

Meta keywords are a specific type of meta tag that appear in the HTML code of a webpage and help tell search engines what the topic of the page is. They are snippets of text that describe a pages content and are placed in the head section of the webpage. Meta keywords were once a useful tool for marketers to insert high-volume keywords and phrases into their code to pirate traffic from more popular pages, but they have since been devalued by Google and other search engines because they are too easy to abuse. Google does not use meta keywords in its ranking algorithm, and Bing, Yandex, Baidu, and Naver also exclude and ignore them. Therefore, it is not necessary to use meta keywords on your website for the purpose of ranking in search engines. However, meta tags in general can still be useful for providing more details about your site to search engines and website visitors, highlighting the most important elements of your content, and making your website stand out in search results.