Don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time populating the keyword meta tag. And don’t stuff it with irrelevant words. But do spend time focusing on what the main keywords/phrases are for a page, do create content that utilizes those words, and do populate those words into the meta tag. You might even add synonyms and a misspelling or two to help the engines.

At the time, we said, “the search engines virtually ignore meta tag keyword entries.” Recent developments indicate that you can strike the word “virtually” and safely say, “the search engines ignore meta tag keyword entries.”

In fact, Google engineer Matt Cutts mentions that fact three times in a short four paragraph blog post, and highlights it more with a video (below). For good measure, Google says the same thing in its Official Blog, and adds the Cutts video again for good measure. (I think they’re trying to tell us they don’t use the keywords meta tag.) Recently, Yahoo was quoted as saying the same thing at SMX East in New York. (UPDATE: Danny Sullivan says that Yahoo does use the keyword meta tag, and used this word xcvteuflsowkldlslkslklsk to prove it.)

So, should you spend a lot of time on the keyword meta tag? No. Should you spend time researching keywords and phrases about which you’ll create content, pages, description meta tags, title tags and link opportunities. Yes! (And go ahead and put those in the keyword meta tag for good measure, especially if you use the Google Search Appliance or similar tool.)