One of my clients just asked me to start putting together lists of meta keywords for his websites. You know, keywords that don’t show up for human readers, but that are meant to tell the search engines what your site is about.

The only problem is that meta keywords don’t actually help your search results anymore. Back in the day, meta keywords were crucial to SEO writers. If you were writing any kind of web content, you could expect clients to request keywords as a matter of course. But most search engines don’t even look at meta keywords anymore.

The last hold out, Yahoo! announced this week that its search engine no longer uses meta keywords — and hasn’t for several months. Bing doesn’t check for meta keywords and neither does Google. Even most of the more minor search engines seem to have dropped meta keywords.

This has a couple of implications for writers, especially since many clients may not have heard this news or didn’t understand it. First of all, it means that we don’t really need to write lists of keywords — and that our clients shouldn’t consider it a standard request. Of course, that’s not the case in the real world yet, but it’s worthwhile to keep yourself educated on issues like meta keywords so that you can, in turn, educate your clients on the most useful aspects of hiring a writer.

I still have meta keyword tags on most of my sites, primarily because I put together those parts of my sites long enough ago that there didn’t seem to be a good reason not to. It is a fast change on a site, typically, although it’s not really necessary to go back and edit keywords out of old projects. It’s really just a question of whether you’ll put them in on future websites.