The Short Answer
Meta keywords — the hidden meta name="keywords" tag — are dead. Google has ignored them for over a decade, and no major search engine uses them for ranking. You don't need to fill them in.
Why Meta Keywords Died
In the early 2000s, webmasters stuffed the tag with hundreds of keywords to manipulate rankings. Search engines quickly realized the tag was useless — it was spam, not information — and stopped counting it. Bing formally announced ignoring it in 2020; Google stopped long before.
What Replaced Them
Modern SEO communicates relevance through signals search engines trust:
Content that naturally covers the topic
Title tags and meta descriptions written for people
Headings that structure the page
Internal and external links
User behavior — clicks, time on page, returns
Still Worth Doing Today
Keywords themselves are still important — as research. You should know which terms customers search, and use them naturally in titles, headings, URLs, and content. What's dead is the hidden tag, not the practice of thinking about keywords.
One caveat: some old CMS setups still expose a meta keywords field. You can leave it empty — filling it wastes time and adds nothing. The fields that matter are the ones people see: title and meta description.
The Bottom Line
Skip meta keywords. Spend that time writing a good title, a clear description, and content that genuinely answers the search. That's what actually earns rankings in 2026.