It’s a cold, dark night and you’ve sat down to write the perfect collection of keywords to use in your website’s <meta name=”keywords”> tag to work your way up that elusive and exclusive club of the first page of Google search results.

Well, I hate to burst your bubble but it would have been more constructive to watch re-runs of Bold and the Beautiful. When it comes to your page rank in Google <meta name=”keywords”> has zero affect!

Now the reason.

In the ‘old days’ a nasty group of websites used to stuff their <meta name=”keywords”> with keywords that were completely irrelevant to their site. You’d enter a search phrase in Google such as “cheap t-shirt printing” and then select a result to view only to be surprised that the website is not about t-shirts or printing, but rather something you’d really rather not see…

So Google decided to ignore this useless and highly misleading tag <meta name=”keywords”>.

Don’t worry, not all is lost! Take the keywords you once used in your <meta name=”keywords”> tag and create real text content on you website that contains these keywords.

Next is <meta name=”description”>. This is not used by Google to rank your website. In other words, if you enter “cheap t-shirt printing” in your <meta name=”description”> and someone types that in Google your website will not appear.

However Google will use the <meta name=”description”> as the website preview text if there is not enough actual text on your site. Unlike <meta name=”keywords”> which his essentially useless, <meta name=”description”> has some relevance but only for display purposes and again plays no part in actually improving you websites Google rank.

To modify your DecoNetwork websites <meta name=”description”> browse to Manage Store > Store Settings > General Settings and select the “Keywords” tab.

Finally, don’t take my word for it. Check out Google’s official announcement in September 2009:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html