It used to be the case that search engines would figure out what sites to display for a given search based on keywords from each site compared to the words in the search. But then Google came on the scene. Google indexes your entire site, not just the keywords. That’s why content is so important, you could stuff a thousand keywords onto your site but if you don’t have the content to back them up Google doesn’t care. So are keywords still that important to use?

Google may look at them to try to figure out what category your site will go into for some regular expression matching based on a users search, but it probably won’t matter unless you have a high pagerank with a ton of backlinks.

Having said all that I wouldn’t just abandon keywords on your page. No one knows how the algorithms work for search engines so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Keep using them, but focus on content and linking.

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