by samGoogle has recently announced a new keyword meta tag for use in their search engines. But don’t worry – this isn’t a step backwards to the day when search engine optimisation meant meta tagging each page with the keywords (which left the door open for a hell of a lot of spammers). This new meta tag system is on operation for news publishers, acting as sources in Google News. For these news publishers, applying news_keyword as a tag allows publishers more freedom to write without worrying about insertion of the keywords in the content of the articles. This will come as a relief to news publishers, as they can now concentrate on producing great articles, and not formulating entire sentences or paragraphs around stuffing in another keyword or phrase.
Google News Product Manager Rudy Galfi explains that the goal is to “empower” news writers to produce free content, but also to categorise the articles with Google News to ensure the relevant articles can be found by those looking for it.
So now, with use of the news_keyword meta tag, publishers select a series of the most relevant terms, which do not need to appear in the headline or body text. 10 keywords can be chosen, with separating commas.
The meta tag can be formulated like this, with the italicised replaced with the actual keywords, of course:
meta name=”news_keywords” content=“keyword, keyword, keyword”
Google assures us that the new metatag is not going to let spammers or low-quality articles claw their way to the top of listings, as Google News prefers high-quality reporting and interesting news to an article that’s just been tagged with keywords. So don’t worry SEO experts and online content strategists – this change doesn’t mean your hard work creating optimised content has been wasted!