Search engine optimization involves improving the volume and quality of traffic to your website from search engines.  For this process to work, you need to provide a variety of keywords for your site- meta keywords included.  Meta keywords used to be a huge influence on getting your website ranked in search engines, but currently these keywords seem to be useless for SEO purposes.  But why?

In the past, webmasters could easily spam each search.  They would fill their meta tags with tons of keywords which helped them to get good rankings very quickly.  Today, search engines such as Google are refining their algorithms to place no importance on meta keywords, but rather the content of your webpage.  Therefore, it is recommended that you spend more time preparing quality content on your page rather than on meta keywords.

These keywords are essentially high-level data about what a particular page on a website is about.  However, when the search engine spiders crawl your website they ignore these keywords and focus their attention instead to the content generated on the page.  Content is king in the world of SEO.

This has been public knowledge for years, yet many individuals who are new to SEO still focus on meta keywords.  If you can ignore this aspect of your SEO plan, you will be able to devote more time to important items like writing quality content.  In order to prevent website owners and SEOs from spamming search engines with meta tags, Google had to announce that they would de-emphasize them.  Now, the Google algorithm has become so advance that it can understand what a website is about without even looking to meta or description tags.

So, keep your focus on writing unique and helpful content.  This will naturally generate links for your website and create an online opinion of your content which plays a large role in search engine rankings.