I have always wondered, are keyword meta tags necessarily designed for a whole site or just a page? For instance, for a typical web designer with home, portfolio and contact pages, would the keywords be the same, or should they be unique according to the content? I have seen many sites that only place them on the home page, and others where they are identical all the way through, but, given recent crackdowns on unnecessary or duplicate keywords I feel this deserves some discussion.
As the major search engines completely ignore keyword tags, it doesn't matter a great deal. I think your 'recent crackdowns' are from about 10 years ago. If you've going to put them in for the few minor ones that still take some notice of them, just as well put different ones for each page if you can.
NOT TRUE!! GOOGLE SEARCH The only reason I'm showing on this search is because of my Meta Tags Also Meta tags can be for an entire website, images, links or pages!
This question was more theoretical than to put into practice, and whilst I realise that the smaller search engines tend to pay more attention to keywords than the larger search engines, I wouldnt usually list with a smaller one unless it was particularly useful for providing traffic to a market niche. My reason for posting was in fact more to do with the way more and more blogs are talking about black-hat SEO and how bigger engines like Google have been penalising sites because of their excessive, irrelevant or duplicate keywords, so I have to agree with bbrian017 and say that clearly they are still being noticed. My main point is to discuss whether using unique words on each page according to their content would be a more efficient way of doing things, and change the future of SEO?
I would have to say yes! If I had the time and understood how to do it I would add tags to everything even my wife!