HTML Keywords for Search Engines - What Actually Works

Do HTML keywords still help you rank in search engines?

Short answer: no, not on Google or Bing. The <meta name="keywords"> tag stopped affecting rankings back in 2009, and neither search engine has used it since. If you've been adding a keywords meta tag hoping it'll help your page get found, it won't hurt anything - but it won't help either. A handful of minor search engines may still glance at it, but nothing worth building a strategy around.

There's a distinction worth being clear on here, though. The meta keywords tag - a specific line of code in your page's <head> - is what's dead. The actual words on your page are a completely different thing, and they matter enormously. Search engines read your title, your headings and your body text to work out what your page is actually about - if a page about dog grooming never once says "dog grooming" anywhere in its visible text, that's a real problem, tag or no tag. The old mistake was stuffing keywords into a hidden tag hoping to game the system. The modern version is simpler: write naturally about your actual topic, using the words a real visitor would search for, where they genuinely belong.

So if the meta keywords tag doesn't do the job anymore, what does? The tags and content below are what actually influence whether your page shows up, and where.

How to optimise your website for search engines

Search engines try to match searchers with the most relevant page for what they typed. Your job is to make that relevance obvious - to the search engine, and to the person reading the results.

1. Set a title and description for every page

• Page title - this is the <title> tag in your <head>, not any heading that shows on the page itself. It's what shows as the clickable blue link in search results and the tab name in your browser. Front-load it with what the page is actually about - for a page about nature photos, "Free Nature Photography - Downloadable Images" tells both the searcher and the search engine exactly what they're getting.
• Meta description - the summary text under your title in the search results. Google sometimes uses it as-is, sometimes pulls a more relevant snippet from your page content instead - but a well-written one still shapes whether someone clicks. Write it like ad copy: what's on the page, and why it's worth clicking.
• Every page needs its own - don't reuse the same title and description sitewide. A search engine (and a searcher comparing your pages in results) can't tell your pages apart if they all say the same thing.

A few other meta tags are worth having on every page too, even though none of them affect ranking directly: charset (tells the browser how to read your text correctly - see step one of our HTML basics tutorial), viewport (makes your page usable on a phone instead of shrunk down to fit), and a canonical tag if the same content is ever reachable at more than one URL (tells search engines which version is the real one, so they don't split your ranking signals across duplicates). None of these will move you up the results on their own - they just make sure search engines and visitors can actually read and trust the page properly, which everything else depends on.

Our own meta tag generator builds the title, description and social sharing tags for a page in a couple of clicks, with a live preview of how it'll actually look in Google, Facebook and Twitter/X results.

2. Use a proper heading structure

Give each page one <h1> that describes what the page is about, then break the content up with <h2> and <h3> tags as it goes deeper into subtopics - the same way this page does. It helps search engines understand how your content is organised, and it helps real visitors scan the page instead of facing one unbroken wall of text.

3. Write real alt text for your images

Every <img> tag should have an alt attribute describing what's actually in the image - alt="golden retriever puppy running on grass", not alt="image1" or a pile of keywords stuffed in. Search engines can't "see" a photo, so this is genuinely how they know what it shows - and it's what a screen reader will read aloud to a visitor who can't see the image either.

4. Link to your own important pages

Internal links help search engines find the relationship between your pages, and spread authority between them. The more places on your site that link to a particular page, the more important that page tends to look. If you've got a page you genuinely want to rank, don't leave it orphaned - link to it from wherever it's actually relevant.

5. Keep an eye on what's working

Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both free) on your site. Analytics shows you what pages get visited and how long people stay; Search Console shows you exactly what people searched to find you, and where you're ranking for it - genuinely more useful for SEO than guessing.

Getting your pages into Google and Bing in the first place

You don't need to manually "submit" your website the way people did years ago. These days, the fastest, most reliable path is:

• Create an XML sitemap listing your pages, and submit it through Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools (both free). This tells both search engines every page you want indexed, upfront.
• Link to your new pages from pages that are already indexed - search engines find new content by following links, so a page with zero internal links pointing to it can sit undiscovered indefinitely.
• Use Search Console's URL inspection tool if you want a specific page crawled sooner rather than waiting.

Yahoo uses Bing's search results, so there's no separate submission needed there. Outside of Google and Bing, there isn't really a meaningful ecosystem of other search engines worth submitting to individually anymore.

This is a brief overview, not an exhaustive one - but get these fundamentals right and you should see real movement in your rankings.