Meta Tags and Meta Keywords - Which Matter in SEO Today

Many myths still surround meta tags, especially regarding the supposed effectiveness of the meta keywords tag. Although Google algorithms have ignored keywords in the page header for years, elements such as title, meta description, and meta robots still directly translate into site visibility and click-through rates in search results.
Jakub Korcz
SEO Specialist

The youngest member of the SEO team, and one whose drive and enthusiasm outstrip plenty of his seniors. He holds an engineering degree from Poznan University of Technology, which gave him solid grounding in data analysis and a technical approach to complex projects. Optimizing sites for search engines - from Bing all the way to Google - holds no fear for him.

Published
2026-11-09
1 min read
Meta Tags and Meta Keywords - Which Matter in SEO Today

Today, the most important elements for SEO are primarily the title element, the meta description (indirectly, via click-through rate), and meta robots. Meta keywords have no ranking value in Google's algorithms: the search engine has not used this tag since 2009, and its documentation explicitly lists it as unsupported, stating that it has no effect on indexing or ranking.

Meta tags are tags in the HTML document section that provide search engines and browsers with information about a web page's title, content, indexing, and display. Their direct impact on rankings is smaller than it used to be, but key meta tags still guide search engine crawlers and shape what users see in search results. Below, you will find out which elements are worth optimizing for SEO, how to ensure their uniqueness and length, and why keyword stuffing is harmful. This overview is based on Google's documentation "Meta tags and attributes that Google supports" (as of November 2026).

What are meta tags and where to find them in the page source code

Meta tags are placed in the page header, that is the head section, in the form: the name attribute indicates the type of information, and the content attribute indicates its value. Search engines and web browsers process the tags they support and ignore the rest, so each meta tag only makes sense if something reads it. Users do not see them on the page, but you can find them in the source code (right-click and "View page source") or in an SEO tool. Formally