What does <meta name="keywords"> do, and is it still relevant?

The <meta name="keywords"> tag used to be used to specify keywords describing the page's content, so search engines would understand which queries to show it for.

However, in today's SEO reality this tag no longer matters for ranking and is used only for rare auxiliary purposes.

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#1. What the tag looks like

Here:

• name="keywords": the meta tag type, denotes keywords,
• content: the listed words or phrases, comma-separated.

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#2. What it used to do

Early search engines (in the 1990s and early 2000s) used keywords to understand a page's topic. For example:

→ the bot considered the page relevant to queries like "buy iphone", "smartphone store", and so on.

But over time, webmasters started abusing the tag, inserting dozens of irrelevant words (so-called keyword stuffing).

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#3. Why it became irrelevant

• Google officially stated back in 2009 that the keywords tag is not used for ranking.
• Bing and other search engines also stopped taking its content into account, to avoid manipulation.
• Algorithms now analyze the actual content of the page, not a list of words.

Source:

Google Search Central: "We don't use the keywords meta tag in our web ranking."

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#4. When keywords may still be useful

• For internal site search (for example, a CMS or corporate catalog may use the tag).
• For organizational purposes within a company, as a tag for a document's topic or category.
• For legacy systems, where SEO engines still rely on it (extremely rare).

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#5. If you decide to use it anyway

It will not hurt, but it will not help either. You can write it concisely:

The main thing is not to "stuff keywords" or insert dozens of key phrases.

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#Summary:

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In simple terms: <meta name="keywords"> is an outdated SEO tag. It used to help with ranking, but now search engines ignore it, relying instead on actual text, structure, and user behavior.